Originally posted by rfortson That's a little extreme. The 18-250 isn't a prime, but it's certainly not "useless" in low light.
True. A little hyperbole on my part :-) And those were some very nice shots of your to call me on it.
Quote: Shake reduction will give you a couple of stops, especially at the wider end.
Indeed, I should probably my main usage of the 18-55 is for its wide end, since I have no primes there, and f/3.5 at 18mm is nothing to sneeze at. Sometimes I think of my 18-55 as a DA18/3.5 prime :-)
Also, my initial impressions of these issues were formed with my DS - pre-SR.
Still, as you may recall, one of my main interests is concert photography. Here I'm usually at medium telephoto focal lengths (100mm being my favorite). And while SR helps to be sure, my main enemy is not camera shake but subject motion. If you can't get your shutter speed up to 1/30" or so, you might as well give up (OK, that's more hyperbole, but I think you get the point).
Here's a recent favorite that could not have captured nearly as well with the 18-250:
K200D, M100/2.8, ISO 1600, f/2.8, 1/30"
Of course, the 50-135 would have done just fine - it's not a prime versus zoom issue but simply a speed issue. But for obvious reasons, there's no such thing as an 18-250/2.8. And one can hardly claim that one could leave the 50-135 on one's camera and not miss any shots: it's neither wide enough nor long enough. There are always compromises to be made - meaning, in effect, shots to be missed. So instead of focusing on the "missed" shots, I prefer to focus on the *made* shots - the ones I captured because I had the right lens and the eye.
Looked at in the extreme, one could say that if one is not shooting one's entire life at 30 frames per second with a holographic panoramic camera, one is *always* missing the vast majority of shots that exist in the world. Assuming that the handful you might miss because you were standing in a given spot but didn't have the right focal length mounted are more important than any of the zillions shots you didn't even think to try to take seems kind of silly...