After been trying out Tamron 18-270mm for awhile and during the trip to bali and so on. I find the lens is good walk around lens. But to be frank, I rarely zoom in and rarely use more than 55mm focal length. This is the reason that I feel 18-270mm is a too general lens where by the image quality trade off is too much of sacrifice.
Generally Tamron 18-270mm feels OK for everything. But the sharpness and border and extreme end is really disappointing. Just take a look at this review side with all the MTF data http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/412-tamron_18270_3563vc_canon?start=1
If you look at 18mm, the center is extremely sharp where as the border is really soft. Even stopping down to F/8 and F/11 you will still get a not so constant image quality. The reason here is simple, because when you are travelling and taking group photo or even 2 to 4 persons portrait + scenery images, usually there will be people being position near the edge of the frame. Especially the background and scenery will not always be a the center of the image. Most of the time subject will be position near left or right of the frame and the background/scenery being position at the middle to reflect a more profound image. But due to the image quality, most of the subjects are pretty soft and alot of details are lost. More over the merging and tone mapping of HDR creates some unacceptable artifacts.
The CA is also very bad at 200mm++ some of the CA is just too wide until it is difficult to be corrected with JPEG (because I don't shoot in RAW). Perhaps I should shoot in RAW and reprocess it. Due to the bracketed (3 images) exposure shooting, I cannot have too many RAW stored inside my CF card.
As usual due to my experience for these 3 months of daily usage. I find it not too practical to have 18-270mm Extreme zoom that you got to sacrifice so much of image quality. I personally find it I don't need anything beyond 100mm while travelling unless it is very rare cases I have to take some wild life. But the chances to have those wild life will be rare, except the time I was in Pulau Redang when I need to take some seagull. But yet I believe my 17-40mm L lens able to capture most of our memorable moment.
Due to that reason, I return my Tamron lens for another Tamron lens at 17-50mm F/2.8 that I feel it will be great for me for the coming months. Other than I need to shoot some portrait and wedding images, I guess the sharpness of the image will help a lot even on landscape photography.
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