[mike]

The Mark II lens appears to have had improvements made to corner sharpness at maximum aperture and light fall-off (vignetting) at maximum aperture. However it's performance at telephoto with smaller apertures is disappointing with noticeable softness and ghosting when compared to the older lens. The difficulty is that in Auto or Program AE the camera will tend to stop down in brighter light situations, if you're using the kit lens this could lead to soft looking images.

My choice
My personal favorite lens to use with the EOS 350D (Digital Rebel XT) would be the very good EF-S 17 - 85 mm F4.0 - F5.6 IS which provides big five times wide angle zoom and image stabilization, however at $600 it does push the initial price of a 350D kit to $1,500.

Но лучше увидеть своими глазами.