First off, I am an amateur and don't get paid for the pictures I take. For this reason, I figured I would give the Tamron a try and if I didn't like it I could always return it and consider getting one of the Nikon 70-200's instead. I'm using this lens with a D600, and have admittedly never used the Nikon 70-200 2.8 VR I or II, or the new 70-200 F4. Maybe ignorance is bliss in this case, but for an amateur like me I found it very hard to justify the premium of the 70-200 VR II over the tamron (even with the recent $300 discount).
Build The build of this lens seems very solid. It's not quite up to the standard of the Canon L white lenses, but I would say it's very close to all of the nice Nikon G lenses...mostly metal some hard plastic. Thankfully I don't have to take my gear into rough conditions, but if you did, I think this lens would hold up very well.
VC The vibration control/reduction on this lens is fantastic. When looking through the view finder it really grabs the image and reduces nearly all camera shake. Occasionally it has a bit of a jitter before locking in on the image, but I have yet to see this affect any of the images, only my view through the optics. I can easily hand hold shots at 200mm down to 1/20 and lower if the subject itself isn't moving. I even did some shots down near 1/4 of a second and they were actually very usable, but I wouldn't depend on that unless I absolutely had to.
Image Quality So far the color, contrast, and sharpness of this lens have all been superb. The lens might be just a hair softer at 2.8 than it is at 4.0, but that's only when pixel-peeping at 1:1 and even then it's an extremely close call. For anything beyond 4.0 the lens is extremely sharp, and I would have no hesitancy shooting at 2.8 unless you're going to take a 100% crop and expect the hair on someone's head to be prime-level sharp.
Autofocus The autofocus is fast. I would imagine that unless you're a pro sports photographer whose job depends on getting every shot, this lens's autofocus is plenty fast. It will certainly be fast enough for an amateur like me to shoot sports, fast moving kids, dogs, etc.
Overall, I would highly recommend this lens. I've only had half a week to shoot with it, but so far I am very impressed. If you're like me, the ~$800 saved over the Nikon VR II means the ability to add another very nice lens to your bag. I can't imagine that the VR II would enable me to get any shots that I can't already get with this lens. And so to me that makes it a winner. I'll update the review if my opinion changes as I continue to use this lens.
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