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Rent NowThe Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM is a versatile standard zoom lens for Canon EF-mount cameras, historically notable as Canon’s first lens to feature built-in Image Stabilization when it was originally released alongside the EOS 3 in the 1990s. It’s a longtime favorite as an affordable, well-rounded walk-around lens covering a substantial 4.8x zoom range from wide-angle through medium telephoto.
Optically, the lens spans a 28-135mm focal range with a variable maximum aperture of f/3.5 at the wide end narrowing to f/5.6 at full telephoto, delivering a versatile field of view for everyday shooting, portraits, and travel photography. The optical design incorporates a molded glass aspherical element to maintain sharp definition throughout the zoom range, and the lens delivers decent, respectable image quality for its class and era.
Canon’s compact Image Stabilizer, newly developed for this lens at its release, provides shake correction equivalent to approximately 1.5 stops at the wide-angle end and roughly 2 stops at telephoto, allowing handheld shooting in dimmer conditions without a flash or tripod, particularly useful in venues where flash photography isn’t permitted. Autofocus is handled by a ring-type Ultrasonic Motor (USM) paired with an internal focusing system, delivering reasonably fast, quiet autofocus along with full-time manual focus override; the manual focus ring does not rotate during autofocus operation.
Build quality reflects the lens’s upper-mid-grade consumer positioning, with a plastic barrel construction that keeps the overall weight down while still offering handling in line with Canon’s better consumer zooms, though not to L-series standards. The lens extends during zooming in a rotary (non-internal) design, and because there’s no focal-length lock, some zoom creep can occur when carrying the lens pointed downward. Minimum focusing distance is approximately 0.5m (20″), yielding a maximum magnification of about 0.19x, and the lens accepts 72mm filters.
As a full-frame-compatible lens, the EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM produces its standard 75-18 degree angle of view on full-frame Canon bodies and an effective 45-216mm equivalent field of view on APS-C bodies.
Key Features
– 28-135mm standard zoom (4.8x) for Canon EF mount
– Maximum aperture f/3.5-5.6 (variable)
– Optical Image Stabilizer (approximately 1.5-2 stops of correction)
– Ring-type USM autofocus with full-time manual focus override
– Molded glass aspherical lens element
– Minimum focusing distance of approximately 0.5m (20″)
– Maximum magnification of approximately 0.19x
– 72mm filter thread
– Lightweight plastic barrel construction
– Compatible with full-frame and APS-C Canon EF-mount cameras
