Beautiful silky rich colorful images. The price is great. The build quality is just great. The focus is fast. The only real complaint is the speed, you won't be shooting indoor sports with it, not that you probably want to. The image stabilization was actually very helpful, I took dozens of interior shots of a house that a friend had for sale. All were held by the corners of the rooms, and they were all sharp. I had a monopod and full-size tripod handy, but they weren't strictly necessary, even when I was holding the camera at very odd angles. Another trick for the average photographer, aside from the obvious applications of landscape photography and architecture, is in low light (I use a pair of 430EX-II remote flashes aimed at the ceiling in the room, and blown from the built-in ones of my 7D being triggered (flash) literally means you can accommodate a massive group of people in a small space without everyone having to get together or do anything out of the ordinary.