Recently I heard many good things about the Tamron SP AF28-75mm lens. Many of the internet forums were abuzz about the quality of the lens,   like how its quality was as good as the Canon 28-70mm f2.8 L lens. This of course, made me interested in this lens. I couldn't buy a L lens, but I certainly could buy the relatively inexpensive Tamron. And that I did. I compared it with my existing Canon 50mm 1.4 USM, as I wanted it to replace the 50mm as my standard walkaround lens. Here are my comments, test images and conclusion.

Comments :

First of all, the Tamron is heavy. And I mean really heavy. Its probably twice as heavy as my 50mm. The lens build quality seemed good enough. At least good enough for my inexperienced eyes. Focusing was smooth on my Rebel Ti, not even coming as close to the USM but reasonable nonetheless. Suffice to say people looking for speed in focusing wont find it in this lens.

Test Images :

I took it out for a sojourn in Boston. The snaps were ok, nothing spectacular but still nothing really bad. I wasn't ready to make a decision about this lens yet. So I decided to do some controlled shooting. All done with Fuji Reala 100, mounted on tripod, no flash. Here are the images. Note that the images are resized by the browser to keep it to a reasonable size. You can right click on the image and choose save to see a large image at better resolution.

Tamron is on left, Canon on right. F/2.8 - Canon is the winner quite clearly. But then the Tamron is at its wide open setting.

Tamron is on left, Canon on right. F/4.0 - Canon is still the winner.

Tamron is on left, Canon on right. F/8.0 - Both lenses are very good, with Canon still having an edge. Tamron appears to have better color saturation, but it is only a slight difference.

 

Just for fun, here are images from the Canon at f/1.4 (left) and f/2.0 (right). The Canon's performance at f/1.4 is quite bad, but one wouldnt be shooting at this setting if one has a choice. At f/2.0 the image quality is pretty good. I would certainly be happy with the sharpness.

 

Conclusion :

You should be able to draw your own conclusions from these pictures. :)

Well, what did I end up doing? I returned my Tamron and am sticking with my Canon. Even if I get a bargain Canon 28-70 L lens, I would be reluctant to exchange it with my 50mm. The zoom is very tempting and it might be a convenience, but I find that I can really zoom with my feet in this range.  It is certainly possible that I got a bad Tamron sample or that I didnt focus correctly or my test was flawed. But all I want is good images irrespective of the equipment I use. The effort I put in to capture these images was the same for both lenses, but the quality was vastly different. So in my opinion anything that needs more effort to take a good picture is not worth using.