Sam Bennett posted a reply:
I haven't used the 17-85, but I do have the 18-55 IS and can back up what the Photozone.de review says. It has surprisingly good image quality (clearly better than the non-IS version), so if you can tolerate the lack of fast aperture it's a real steal. I do find myself having to tweak contrast more than I have to with my other lenses and use Lightroom's anti-vignetting on a lot of shots, but for such an inexpensive lens that's a reasonable compromise. The only real distracting thing about the lens optically is that it suffers pretty noticeable barrel distortion on the wide end, but how much it matters depends on what you shoot.
The big bummer about it not having USM beyond the speed and quietness is that manually focusing with it (particularly with the 40D's Live View) can be very awkward since you have to switch from AF to MF instead of using "Full Time Manual" where you can half-press to get initial focus and then handtweak after the fact. I never realize how much I use FTM until I don't have it.
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