Don’t take it personally. Canon sell most of their inexpensive consumer cameras either as camera bodies alone with no lenses or as complete kits with a cheap lens, camera strap and perhaps other accessories included. Such kits are usually aggressively priced, and most consumers go for them since they’re convenient and the supplied lenses are so cheap. The included lenses are usually referred to as “kit lenses,” though they can also be purchased separately if you like.

Unfortunately, kit lenses for low-end cameras are optimized for cheapness, as noted above. They aren’t engineered to offer the best optical quality you can find. This means they’re usually not terribly sharp and they also tend to produce somewhat low-contrast photos. Kit lenses are also considerably less rugged than more expensive lenses. Finally they’re always very slow lenses and so are not much good in low-light situations. These drawbacks are also the case, to varying degrees, for kit lenses made by every manufacturer, incidentally, not just Canon.

Of course, a cheap kit lens will take better photos than a lens you can’t afford and thus don’t have. Particularly if you avoid shooting wide open and use an aperture setting like f/8 to maximize sharpness. Nonetheless, you don’t have to settle for poor quality if you check out the used market or if you’re willing to pay a little extra - see the section after next for details.