silkstone
Feet under the table
Registered: January 2005
Location: Silkstone Common, Yorkshire, UK
Posts: 3263
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Review Date: Mon June 26, 2006
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: £270.00
| Rating: 8
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Pros:
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Wide range, light, compact, sharp enough for most purposes, ideal travel lens
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Cons:
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Actual range is about 17-175mm, max f/6.3 at long end, some CA and distortion, best at f/8 or above
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It is difficult to fault the Tamron 18-200 if you accept it for what it is - a compact, wide range zoom that's ideal for travelling light, or as a leave-it-on-the-camera lens which can do most jobs pretty well.
A lens like this is never going to compete in the pixel-peeping stakes against larger, more expensive glassware that doesn't have to cover a 10x zoom range. However, under decent conditions and at normal viewing sizes, you would struggle to see any real-world difference.
For example, last September I took a mountain of shots on Holy Island in Northumberland, some with the Tamron 18-200 and some with the Canon 17-40L. In the end I stuck with the Tamron because it was windy and I wanted to minimise lens-swapping. After processing the RAW files it really wasn't easy, or even possible, to say for sure which lens had been used for which shot without looking at the EXIF data.
I bought the Tamron 18-200 for a holiday in May 2005, where I didn't want to struggle with an overweight bag full of lenses on a aeroplane. I took just the 10D and this lens in a Lowepro TLZ1 holster case, and I never really felt that I needed anything else.
There is always a downside, and with the Tamron 18-200 it is that miracles really don't happen. The light weight and small size mean a maximum aperture of f/6.3 at the long end. That's no problem in reasonably bright conditions, but this is not a low-light lens. There is also some barrel distortion at 18mm, although this is easily corrected, and CA is not totally absent especially in high contrast scenes at large apertures, but in this respect it's no worse than many other mid-priced lenses.
It is worth mentioning that Tamron have been slightly optimistic about the zoom range. To me it seems closer to 17-175 than 18-200. (Reports I've seen on one of its main competitors - the Sigma 18-200 - suggest that this may be even shorter at the long end, if you see what I mean.)
Overall I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Tamron 18-200 as an extremely useful general-purpose lens. Even if you have other lenses that are technically superior, there are times when you either can't or don't want to do a lot of lens-swapping, or when you want to travel light. Provided you play to its strengths it is capable of producing excellent results.
If someone told me that this was the only lens I could take to my desert island, I wouldn't be upset. I can't say fairer than that.
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