Lens is 5 months old and has been used 4 times. Excellent condition. Like New. Comes in box with all guarentees. 3 Year manufacturers warranty. Front and rear caps and hood included.
The Tamron 70-200 ƒ/2.8 Di VC USD SP telephoto zoom was announced in September 2012, becoming the third iteration of 70-200mm ƒ/2.8 zoom lens. The lens is available in Nikon, Canon and Sony lens mounts.
The lens features a constant ƒ/2.8 aperture across all focal lengths, and is designed to work on both sub-frame (APS-C) and full-frame 35mm image sensors. On sub-frame camera bodies the lens will have an equivalent field of view of either 112 - 320mm (Canon) or 105 - 300mm (Nikon and Sony).
The lens ships with a soft nylon case and a petal-shaped lens hood, and is available now for around $1,500.
Used wide open at ƒ/2.8, the lens produces a decent sweet spot of sharpness between 70mm and 100mm; zoomed in beyond that, images become slightly soft, and noticeably soft on the left hand side at 200mm. Stopping down to ƒ/4 alleviates this problem, but only slightly; you have to stop down as far as ƒ/8 to achieve the sharpest results this lens has to offer. Optimum performance for sharpness appears at 100mm and ƒ/8.
Diffraction limiting sets in at ƒ/11, though you won't notice any impact on sharpness until ƒ/16 where images suffer only slightly from generalized softness across the frame. It's a bit more noticeable at ƒ/22, and while stopping down to ƒ/32 is possible, it's soft across all focal lengths.
Chromatic Aberration
Tamron has done a great job at controlling chromatic aberration with this lens; it's barely noticeable at the wide and telephoto ends (70mm and 200mm, respectively) and in-between, it's very slight indeed.
Shading (''Vignetting'')
With the Tamron 70-200mm ƒ/2.8 VC mounted on the sub-frame D7000, there's a negligible amount of corner shading. However when the lens is mounted on the full-frame D800e, it's a bit of a different story: at the ƒ/2.8 aperture, we note corners that are about 3/4 of a stop darker than the center of the image. Stopping down reduces this; by ƒ/5.6, there's very little corner shading.
Distortion
The Tamron 70-200m ƒ/2.8 VC handles distortion very well; there's very little to speak of with the lens mounted on the sub-frame D7000. Even on the full-frame D800e, barrel distortion at 70mm is only +0.25%, and pincushion distortion at 200mm is only -0.4%.
Autofocus Operation
Autofocus is conducted electronically, without the use of a mechanical screw. It takes less than one second to focus from infinity to closest focus, and it's very quiet as it does so. The front element doesn't rotate during focus operations, making the use of a polarizing filter that much easier.
Build Quality and Handling
Tamron has done an about-face with the design of this lens: the previous version was comparably lightweight in the realm of 70-200mm lenses, but with the introduction of the Vibration Control system, it's back up to relatively the same weight as any other 70-200mm ƒ/2.8 lens. The lens mount is metal; the filter ring is plastic, and there are weather seals integrated into the lens design. The lens offers a windowed distance scale, marked in feet and meters. Tamron has abandoned its system for setting manual focus and replaced it with a conventional full-time manual focus system: that is to say, you can autofocus and turn the focusing ring to adjust focus manually at any time. A standard accessory of the lens is a removable tripod ring.
Tamron has elected to swap the position of the zoom and focus rings: where most other manufacturer's zoom rings come first, and the focus ring further away from the body, it's now the opposite for this Tamron.
The zoom ring is about an inch and a half wide with a ridged, rubber coating. The ring has a relatively short throw - it takes about 30 degrees to turn through the entire zoom range. Because the lens uses an internal zoom operation, the lens doesn't extend and zoom creep isn't an issue.
The focusing ring is about 3/4" wide and also rubber-coated, with deep rubber ribs. Since the lens now uses an electrical focusing system there are no hard stops on either end of the focus throw and the ring will turn forever in either direction.
The lens features Tamron's Vibration Control (VC) image stabilization system, offering 2.5 stops of hand-held improvement at 70mm, and around 3-3.5 stops at 200mm. It's worth looking at our IS Test tab for greater detail.
The front threads on the lens take a 77mm filter, and are plastic. However, the front mount doesn't rotate while focusing or zooming, so good news for polarizer users. The HA001 petal-shaped lens hood works well to prevent lens flare, and reverses on the lens for storage. The interior of the lens hood is ribbed. Using the hood will add almost 4 inches to the overall length of the lens.
