Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I felt like I was taking a gamble when I bought this lens, because I was not able to find many reviews of it. Given that the equivalent Nikon was almost 3x the price, I decided to take a chance. At this point I still can't give a solid thumbs up or down, so I opted to give it a 3. Here is a short history of my experience:
1) Bought lens from Amazon to use on my D50. It was a joy to have an f/2.8 zoom lens, but I was not totally convinced about the sharpness (which the few reviews I could find said was supposed to be really good). After comparing it to my other lenses and a rented Nikon 17-55 f/2.8 (great lens, but much bulkier and heavier), I determined that it front-focused so much that the subject would always be very slightly out of focus. It wasn't obvious right away, because the front-focusing meant that the background went out of focus really quickly, making for a great depth-of-field effect. The heavily out of focus background essentially made the subject look more focused, even though it really wasn't all that sharp. After much deliberation, I sent it back to Amazon to try another copy.
2) 2nd copy. This one was much sharper but back-focused, which I found to be even more annoying. This would manifest itself by someone's eyes and nose being out of focus and their ears and hairline being razor sharp. After trying to force myself to live with it, I decided I couldn't and sent it off to Tamron for calibration. Several people in lens forums mentioned that this did the trick, so I decided to give that a shot rather than send it back to Amazon (they were out of stock at the time anyway, so it made the decision easier).
3) Tamron told me that they were running slow, so it would take 5 weeks to calibrate it. Again weighing the extra $800 I'd have to pay to buy the Nikon, I decided to send it in. It actually took 8 weeks! And when I wrote them to inquire at the 7 week mark, they said they had no record of it. I think that was just because they had already shipped it, but it did scare me at first.
4) Calibrated lens. My first impression was wow, this thing really is sharp, and I was really glad that I has sent it back in. And that's when I started noticing something strange... many of my shots were looking massively overexposed. I was out on a nice, evenly-lit overcast day, so I wasn't able to figure out why the camera was having such a difficult time metering. After a few more shots, I realized that anything taken at an aperture smaller than f/2.8 would be overexposed, which led me to suspect a problem with the aperture blades. Sure enough, they were stuck wide open, so every picture was at f/2.8, regardless of the actual setting. At this point in the story, I was very unhappy.
5) Tamron customer service. I expressed my frustrations to them in an email over Christmas weekend, and I am happy to say that they responded positively the next business day. They gave me their Fedex #, so that I didn't have to pay return shipping. They also promised that they would keep it for only 2 or 3 days and ship it back right away. That made me feel a little better.
6) ???? I have not received it back yet (should be soon), so I don't have a final recommendation on this lens. My sense is that it will follow the "worth what you pay for it" adage. It will have taken a large investment of time (actually, waiting), but in the end I hope to have a pretty good lens at a relatively bargain price. There have been several times that I wanted to give up and just go buy the Nikon, but not being a professional, it's really hard to justify paying $1200-1300 for a single lens.
Otherwise, the lens is really nice. It's nice and compact for what it does, and what several have complained about as a "really loud focus noise" doesn't seem bad to me at all. It does have some pretty serious distortion, especially at wide angle. It's a complex moustache distortion which isn't correctable with Photoshop's built in correction. I did send in photos to the creator of PTLens, and he calibrated the lens and integrated it into the PTLens plugin (and standalone version). With that, your photos can be essentially distortion-free. It's really impressive how well it works. Of course, I used the lens for weeks before I really noticed the distortion. I took a picture of brick wall and couldn't believe how bad it was. Unless your photo has a continuous horizontal element, you're unlikely to even notice this.
I wish my review could be more conclusive, but I'm feeling ambiguous at this point. Hope that this helps someone trying to decide on this lens.
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17-50mm F2.8 Di Ii F/Nikon
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