I've been considering the Nikon 70-300mm VR Lens Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED IF AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras for quite a while, but glad that Amazon had an issue recently and stopped selling it directly (not sure why).
I noticed that this Tamron lens goes to f4 instead of f4.5 and has an Ultrasonic Drive (USD) for autofocus (AF) which is on par with Nikon and Canon technologies. I've also been watching eBay to see what kind of price I could pickup the Nikon for used or refurbished and found I could buy the Tamron for about the same price new(after $50 rebate) with a 6 year warranty. I'm not sure why, but there are a ton of the Nikon lenses being sold refurbished, which only have a one year warranty. There are several comments here on Amazon about reviewers getting a bad copy of the lens. So I figured I would take a chance on the Tamron lens, glad I did!
I started taking sports pictures at my son's football games and have been blown away by the speed of the USD. My camera is a Nikon D90 and taking photos at 4.5fps was easy with continuous AF.
I took some shots all the way out at 300mm and this lens produced very sharp results with great depth-of-field and Bokeh. This lens works with full frame FX and cropped frame DX cameras, so the zoom on my D90 is fantastic. Rarely did I have any results that weren't excellent.
The Tamron lens also has their XLD (extra low dispersion glass) that seems pretty evident in the sharpness and lack of chromatic aberration. This is Tamron's first lens to incorporate all of these high end technologies and I think they got it right.
Several of the shots I took were of kids running at high speed and I purposely slowed the shutter down to capture some of the motion in the images. Tamron's VC (vibration correction) performed stellar with my erratic panning and hand holding. I did a test with it off and the difference is dramatic. My other Nikon lenses with VR perform well, but the Tamron VC has got them beat for sure.
I love competion, because it makes everyone better. I'd say in this case, Tamron has finally put out a product that beats Nikon.
0 comments:
Post a Comment