While there are better and worse lenses from any company, Canon and Nikon are top providers, and any lens you buy from them a good bet to be a good to great lens. I’m a Nikonian myself, but there are lenses I am happier and less happy with. I am sure that is true for Canon owners too.

I can see Sigma or Tamron lenses filling a niche in my holding, but not being a principal lens I shoot with. There are too many years down the road to worry about compatibility issues. Will it work well with the next generation of Speedlight? Who knows. I’m not going to risk it though.

I definitely see an upgrade in my future, but not for a year or so and lenses keep their value surprisingly well.

I own three lenses and a canon 30D (previously a 10D). My most recent acquisition was a 17-40L, which is wonderful insomuch as I get nice, sharp images and wide angles I haven’t seen since I last picked up a film slr.

The line of snobbery has to do with how and why you post positive/negative reviews to forums. There are and will always be equipment fetishists out there, arguing the merits of the Canon xx-yy VS Sigma xx-yy, but in the end, the general rule is that lenses are stratified into “quality groups” roughly by price. You know if you are buying a $1000 lens, you should expect a certain featureset and performance and build quality.

What is different nowadays, with the internet, is that people can get into the minutae of this $1K lens feature group vs brand X’s lineup, et al, in a much more immediate timeframe. Back and forth about bokeh on this lens versus that one, etc. One day somebody will start the “ultimate lens review site”, one big table replete with links to mtf charts, grading of bokeh, and build quality, with columns for “this lens has bad copy syndrome”, etc. Since there is no such definitive resource right now (well, maybe photozone), you can see arguments ad nauseum about the smallest things.

Sure, some people buy for bragging rights. Some have concerns about whether it is good for the kinds of image-making they want to do. Some just want to know if Canon used an army of badly-trained chimpanzees to build lens Y, and whether it will spend the first year in and out of Canon’s service facilities. The curse of more available information is that people will want to know, and others will want to share. Like everything in life, some share information and some share brags and some are informed and some are well-meaning, and it’s up to the reader to distinguish between the various groups. I am more than willing to sort through some snobbism to have access to the wealth of non-corporate-spin reviews and hands-on experiences that forums provide.

Thanks for correcting me re: lense vs lens! I promise from this point forward to *try* to remember which is correct