Keeping it steady
Image stabilisation can be built into the lens or camera body. Some systems use both at the same time
Image stabilisation has become so ubiquitous and universally accepted as a useful tool that it's easy to forget it's become a mainstream feature only recently. But, now, while no camera maker would dream of selling a camera kit without some form of stabilisation except at bargain-basement prices, just a decade ago Canon and Nikon were happily shifting shelf-loads of DSLRs with unstabilised18-55mm kit zooms.
Perhaps because of this, there are still a number of myths and misunderstandings regarding stabilisation, its benefits and its pitfalls. In this article I'm going to take a close look at all aspects of the technology, so you can better understand how it works, what it can and cannot do, and how you can exploit it to get better pictures.
Background
In 1994 Nikon became the first company to include optical stabilisation in a camera, in a 38-105mm lens that was built into the Zoom 700VR 35mm film compact. However the following year, Canon introduced the technology to a wider audience with the EF 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6 IS USM: the first image-stabilised lens for SLR cameras. At around £400 it was expensive for a consumer telezoom, and its stabilisation system was considerably less effective than modern ones, bringing perhaps two stops of benefit.
Like most transformative technologies, image stabilisation was rather derided when it first appeared; it was seen as a crutch for poor handholding technique that offered little practical advantage for the price. But it expanded the range of light conditions in which photographers could shoot handheld, especially given the low-ISO film most of us were using at the time. The Canon lens also introduced photographers to the benefits of a stabilised viewfinder, allowing more accurate composition.
Initially, relatively few lenses included image stabilisation, and these were mostly large, expensive telephoto primes. More than a decade passed before the technology appeared in the mass-produced, inexpensive kit lenses
