The Tamron is a fairly unique design. It has a separate macro range, accessed by pushing a switch when you are between 180mm and 300mm zoom, and at minimum focus. You can not engage the macro range until you have these conditions met. Once you are in macro mode, the zoom is limited from 180-300mm, but the entire focus range is enabled from 0.95m to infinity with autofocus. It is a slow focusing lens and like other Tamrons with low gearing to drive the AF, appears to be very accurate on all the Dynax bodies.
This lens is of course suitable for film bodies, and unlike the new 70-300mm G SSM, it will work on models like the Dynax 9 unmodified, Dynax 800si, 7xi, 7000 and so on. Many owners have functioning film bodies of an older date and the move to SSM locks these out of AF functionality with all bodies prior to the 1999 Dynax 7.
This is a full aperture image detail – the bright reflected spots show how the aberrations surround or flare out from a sharp core image, which contains very fine detail – Alpha 350 original in-camera JPEG clip
The lens uses LD (Low Dispersion) elements, but it is not apochromatic and at full aperture displays some visible aberrations especially surrounding sharply focused light details. The image ‘core’ remains very crisp behind this veil of secondary imaging, and it only takes a little stopping down to tidy up the results. Our Bengal tiger cub (one of triplets born in the crocodile animal rescue park near Ingenio, Gran Canaria) was caught in movement, at full aperture, and despite the overlay of softness you can pick out eyelash-level detail on the 14.2 megapixel Alpha 350 image.
Here is the very next shot on the card – a 100 per cent clip of a zero sharpening, no NR, no processing ACR raw conversion from a shot taken fairly close to an alligator, f/9 and 130mm. The lack of colour fringes on the bright highlights is impressive.
Please remember what a 100 per cent clip from a non-sharpened 14 megapixel file actually is. Yes, I can make a 600 x 400 web image which looks sharper than this but making a 4952 x 3056 image at this sharpness with any USM – a five foot wide overall image at normal screen resolution – really tests any lens.
LENS IS AS NEW - NEAT CONDITION
COMES WITH
LENS
LENS CAP X 2
HOOD
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