Are the tamron lens any good?

[david laguna]

Ok Heres the deal. I am ordering a NIKON d90 off ebay and it comes in a kit the kit consist of 2 tamron lens I think 75-300 and and somethin else. I am looking forward to taking outdoor portraits of people I also saw a kit with NIKON VR lens also 70-300 I want to get this kit but I'm on a budget. So is tamron good. I want my pictures to be sharp and nice.

Please help.

 

[Tyson Benard]

Lots of people seem to have very good opinions of Nikon glass, so that may be the better option. I use a Tamron 18-200 quite often (not my lens or camera) and it seems soft when I compare it to my Contax zooms. It seems to get a lot of chromatic aberration in outdoor environments with contrast.

The Tamron is ok for a tight budget, but there are definitely better lenses out there for reasonable prices. So if you can, take a little more time to research some options before going all in and see what else you can get within your price range.

 

[Chris McKechnie]

Never try and buy a camera/lens kit package. Generally, the lenses aren't very good and you'd be better spending that money on different lenses, like Tyson mentioned, the Zeiss Contax line. Some of the cheapest lenses around for a far superior quality to the Tamron line. You could also look at the Rokinon Cine Primes as well. Try and stay away from Tamron if you can. Obviously, all these are manual lenses, so you should be confident in focusing manually. :-0

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

I have some Tamron zooms. Their advantage is that they are nice and compact. But they are a bit soft, compared to more expensive glass. If "sharp" is a priority, it's not your best option. I keep mine around because "portable" sometimes outweighs sharp in my world. If I want sharp, I'll pull out my Canon lenses. Or even certain Sigma glass.

Tamron zooms are more handy than sharp. They still work well in many applications.

 

[Uli Plank]

The old Tamron SP 90mm 1:2.5 macro is a beauty, very nice for portrait too, gorgeous bokeh. The AF version shouldn't be too different.

But apart from that one I never found any Tamron too convincing – didn't keep any of those I tested.

 

[Maik Müller]

Tested the 24-70/2.8VC yesterday, it's one of the few really interesting lenses from Tamron. Optically it looks nice, VC seemed to work on my Scarlet, but i'm not convinced by the housing and i really dislike the focus ring. It's thin and doesn't feel that good.

Final decision, i'm not going to buy this lens. I wish SiGMA would come up with a new ART-series killer-lens for that zoom range.