Canon 700D kit lens upgrade

[groberts0]

My Sigma UWA lens and recently acquired Canon EF 300mm IS lens cover my top and bottom / wide angle requirements very well but I would now like to upgrade the 18-55 kit lens that originally came with the Canon 700D camera. Doesn't need to be Canon.

Apart from just better build quality I want to ensure it has:

• Better manual focus with approximate focus distances marked (I thought this was standard until I got this kit lens);
• Wider aperture say f2.8 or thereabouts?
• Unless there's a downside I've overlooked, an EF equivalent rather than EFS - I use an internal Astronomik light pollution filter for astrophotography which fouls the longer back focus of an EFS lens; what is the operating difference between EF and EFS lenses?

Thanks, Graham

 

[Jannyfox]

Tamron 17-50mm f2.8? Nice little lens and I've used mine for wide field astro. It is EF so isn't as long into the body as the EF-S lenses. I used to have a filter in my old 350D astro camera but since it's been modded we've not bothered putting it back in, so I can't check if it definitely fits with the filter in.

 

[groberts0]

Thanks, like the sound of that.

How about the Sigma 17-50 f2.8 or 17-70 f2.8-4.0?

 

[Jannyfox]

The Tamron is the only one I've used so I can't comment on the Sigmas. All I can say is that if the lens spec is the same (for example Sigma's 150-600C and the Tamron equivalent) then quality wise there's really nothing between Tamron and Sigma.