Zoom range test for Tamron 18-270mm

This is the shot taken at 18mm at my balcony. You can see there are 3 cranes building up another few Condos. At wide open, I guess the image quality is OK, and everything just seems to be OK, if you wanna get a better image quality Stop down to F/5.6 should be good. at F/3.5 is just a bit soft. All photo are taken using Canon 7D, which means it is an APS-C sensor, not full frame. So the zoom actual focal length should be X1.6

I just zoom into 35mm, everything seems to be just normal, nothing great nothing too bad.

50mm zoom in. Actually the image quality is getting a bit sharper here. Perhaps that is the optimized zoom range for this lens. If you are aware of the zoom range, it is about 3X from 18mm. This image quality can be easily comparable to other competitor such as canon and sigma. Other than that, you can complain too much with kind of "affordable" price. For portrait and normal photo shooting. 18-55mm lens with F/2.8 is always preferable compare to this zoom lens. If you are going for F/2.8 lens at least get a sigma if you can't afford canon.

Now we are at 70mm zoom range. No doubt the image quality is quite decent here. But it still can't rival at 70mm F/2.8. For general purpose usage, it is comparable to sigma and canon multi purpose zoom lens.

This is 100mm zoom range. The image quality is still quite decent. Stepping down 1 or 2 stops usually will help to improve image quality. 

Now we have come to 200mm zoom. The vignetting is observable at the corner of the image. the contrast is weak here. CA starts to crawl out in this picture too.

Not much I wanna comment here. You should this is the 270mm end zoom. If you crop it 100% you should see the image is soft, it has color fringing and it has CA. But if you look it from this picture, it is still quite usable. For telephoto zoom, most likely the subject will be at the middle of the picture. For border and extreme edge, it is soft, less contrast with some vignetting.




Because it is a general purpose lens, so it is not great in any aspect, but it is a great general purpose lens that offers focus length from 18mm all the way to 270mm. If you were to carry F/2.8 lens, you might need 2 to 3 lens to cover all this focus length. The weight will be 10 times more than this lens if you add on a 17-55mm F/2.8 + 70-200mm+ anything to 300mm. 


Yes, again this is a general purpose lens. Walk around lens that covers from wide angle till 270mm telephoto zoom range. Sometimes you just want to capture the moment, and this lens might give you a shot of what you want. But for professional that stress too much on Image quality, this is definitely not their choice. May be a poor paparazzi might prefer this?