Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 Di VC USD Lens Review

photo by Anil Rajappan

The mid-range fast zoom is probably my most used lens, so I always have two of them whenever I work. This way, if one breaks, I have a backup. Being a music photographer means I go through a lot of gear; the sound and vibration coming from the stage destroy equipment very quickly. In 2015, both my mid-range zoom lenses broke down. My Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 AF-S focus motor broke, and my backup Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 lens fell apart. So I had to buy a replacement quickly. For me, it was an easy decision on what lens to buy. I saw that the Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 Di VC USD Lens had been released recently, and I read many positive reviews on the lens. With its VC built into the lens, I knew it was something I wanted to have in my bag.

photo by Anil Rajappan

Now I will ruin the rest of the review by saying that this lens is simply one of my most used lenses, and it is my go-to lens when carrying around my camera at shows. The focal range is great, the VR is really good, and it feels well-built. Not as well-built as the Nikon Beast (Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 AF-S), but it still feels nice and solid in your hands. The lens has so many good things going for it that I am scared I will sound like a fanboy in this review.

photo by Anil Rajappan

If you have bought any Tamron lenses recently, most of their boxes look the same, and the packing is pretty standard stuff—nothing like Fuji lenses that I have been buying lately. The lens is well protected in cardboard and comes with the standard lens hood and instruction manual. Nothing special, but who really cares about the boxes that lenses come in? What most people care about is the lens itself.

The lens consists of 17 elements in 12 groups, has 9 aperture blades, and weighs about 845g. The body of the lens is made of plastic (All modern lenses are made from plastic except for Leica and some Fuji and Pentax lenses), but it feels good in the hand. It has some heft to it, and the rubber rings on the lens make it easy to grip. I often change lenses very quickly at work, usually in the dark, but I never feel like the lens will slip out of my hands.

photo by Anil Rajappan

The back of the lens has a metal lens mount and a rubber gasket to provide weather sealing. The weather sealing is a huge deal for this lens, in my opinion. I used the previous Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 lens for many years, and I loved that lens, but I was very reluctant to use it in wet weather. The build quality of this lens feels very good, a huge step up from the older Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8. The older Tamron lens was a beast in toughness; it survived a lot of bumps over the years and always kept working. The new Tamron lens feels even tougher, so I had very high hopes for it the first time I held it in my hands.

A Blackrapid camera strap failure sent my Nikon N90s flying down onto the ground, breaking the viewfinder and cracking the body. I thought the Tamron lens would be destroyed as well because it went crashing down onto the concrete, but the lens handled the fall much better than the camera did.

A few weeks after buying this lens, I put it onto one of my old Nikon film cameras to test it out. The autofocus did not really work on the old film camera, but I was not bothered by it. So far, none of the Tamron lenses autofocus well on the old film cameras. While I was shooting outside, I took a shot and then put my camera down to my side. I expected to feel the camera pull down onto my BlackRapid strap, but instead, I felt nothing and heard a sickening crash of plastic hitting concrete. I saw bits of black plastic all around the camera. At first, I thought it was the lens that broke, but it was the Nikon N90s that was damaged. The Nikon N90s is built like a brick. I always thought that I could kill an elephant with the camera, so the fact that the camera broke and not the Tamron lens tells me this lens can take a real beating. The only damage to the lens was the lens hood; it got a little scratched up in the fall. But that left me with a serious problem: I had not taken any product photos of the lens yet, so I had to outsource all the product photos in this review to another photographer. On a side note, I learned to check my BlackRapid straps now, as I have seen that they can wear out easily and break.

photo by Anil Rajappan

The lens has two plastic buttons on one side, which are for auto-focus and VC. The switches feel okay, but I wish they were a little stiffer. I have had the lens VC switch pushed to the off position a few times in my bag already. On the other side of the lens is a lock button to lock the lens when it is in the 24mm zoom range.

photo by Anil Rajappan

You absolutely need to use the lock button as the lens does creep while you walk around with the lens. Strangely enough, the lock button feels great, much stiffer than the two other buttons on the lens. I use the lock button all the time on the lens when I walk around with it.

On my Nikon D3s, the lens feels well-balanced and is easy to handle.

When the lens is mounted on my cameras, it feels very well-balanced. I like this. It does not matter if the lens was on my big D3S or my small APS-C camera. The lens always felt well balanced and that is a sure sign that this lens was well designed.

On my smaller Nikon D5200 that I use for video, then the lens still feels well-balanced but it looks a little ridiculous on the camera though. Just looks too big.

photo by Anil Rajappan

So let’s start with the obvious part: the focusing. I think this lens focuses well. I seldom have missed shots with the lens. It does not hunt for focus, even in the dark, and it is quick to lock onto the focus points. I have never lost a shot because this lens focused too slowly. It focuses much faster than the Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 AF-S and makes the old Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 lens feel like a manual focus lens being focused by a 90-year-old man. I have absolutely no gripes about the focus speed or accuracy of this lens. The Tamron’s Ultrasonic Silent Drive motor is quiet. Really quiet, so this is good for anyone shooting in a quiet location. One benefit of this focusing motor is the ability to offer full-time manual focus override without having to disengage the lens motor. I have used this a few times when I felt the focus was grabbing the wrong focus point and back focusing a little. It is a nice feature to have, but I doubt I will use it much. I shoot mostly at concerts and music festivals, so I really don’t care if a lens is noisy or not. But this lens is great if you work in a place where you need to be quiet.

The autofocus is very accurate—more accurate than with the Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 AF-S and definitely much better than the old Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8. Both those lenses had the habit of back focusing at times with bright lights behind the subject. With the old Nikon and Tamron, I would get about 10% of the shots out of focus at night when shooting on stage. Now, I would say that I am under 3% of my shots being out of focus. This is really great. Shooting shows at night, in extremely low light, with bright lights in the background will quickly show you the pitfalls of a poorly designed focusing system on a lens. I would say that out of all my lenses that I use for work, this lens may be the best focusing lens that I have now. The only lens that I have that focuses as well as this is the Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 lens, which has an unfair advantage in that it is so wide.

I am really not interested in shooting charts and comparing them to another lens. I prefer shooting a lens at work and seeing the results I can get. I have shot with this lens now for over a year, and this lens is sharp. Maybe not prime lens sharp, but it is still really sharp and surpasses both the Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 AF-S and Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 lenses in picture quality. I cannot compare it to the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens as I have never shot with it before. The most important thing about this lens’s sharpness is that it is sharp from corner to corner when shot wide open at f/2.8. That is great news for most photographers because many lenses are sharp in the center of the frame but get soft towards the corners. When shooting in real life, the center of the frame is seldom where the action is happening.

I have shot with this lens during the day and at night, and it has always delivered for me. The lens handles colors very nicely, and it renders objects well. The out-of-focus areas, or bokeh, are good, but maybe not as buttery smooth as you would get from a nice prime lens. However, it gets the job done. I am not a bokeh enthusiast anymore. I used to obsess over it, but I stopped caring about it as soon as I realized that paying customers don’t care about it—only photographers do. I don’t shoot to impress other photographers; I only care about what my clients think.

This is the closest I got to testing the bokeh out on this lens. The bokeh is ok, not super smooth but more than workable. I seriously doubt any client would complain about it or even notice it.

The lens can vignette a tiny bit when shot wide open, but you have to be shooting against a white wall to see this. I have never really seen any vignetting in my shots unless I crank up the contrast and drop the shadows all the way down. So I would say that vignetting is something you don’t have to worry about with this lens.

You can see a slight vignette in the bottom corners of this shot. It is very slight and can only be seen when the contrast is high. If I had dropped the contrast a little, I doubt you would even see a vignette in the image

Chromatic aberrations were something that drove me a little crazy with the old Tamron lens, but it is much better this time around. You can still get some chromatic aberrations when shooting in high-contrast situations, but it is fairly well-controlled and has never been a problem for me. Chromatic aberrations are not really a problem when they are not too severe. They only become an issue when they are completely out of control and very noticeable., like with the Fujifilm XF 18mm F2 R lens that I have reviewed. Most editing software can handle some chromatic aberrations and the little bit that this lens produces is no problem for Lightroom to handle.

I would expect there to be some chromatic aberrations in this shot near the roof of this pavilion. I was shooting into the sun and the contrast between the metal roof and the sun should have given me some chromatic aberrations but I found almost none, and the little that was there was dealt with inside Lightroom.

The biggest reason I was interested in this lens was the VR. When this lens came out, it was the first lens to have VR in this focal length. I was getting into video at the time and thought this feature would be a great benefit to me. At shows, I like to shoot with a fast shutter speed, so the VR is not really worth much to me, but I still wanted it for video or on the odd occasion when the light is so poor that I have to drop the shutter speed lower to get a shot.

Shooting in a snowstorm and a slow shutter speed. The VR works well for stills and video.

The VR works wonders in video. I have shot a few videos with bands now, and the videos came out great even though I was handholding the camera. The VR system kept the image nice and steady. I was extremely happy with the lens for video.

All the shots in the video that are shot from the left of the stage were shot by me, handholding this lens on my Nikon D5200, while standing on a plastic chair so I could shoot over the crowd. I am amazed at how well the VR worked, as I did not think that I would get usable footage at all since the chair was extremely wobbly.

I seldom use this lens outside of work, carrying my big Nikons is simply to painful but when I do take this lens out, I am never disappointed.

The last thing I love about this lens is the weather sealing. I shoot a lot of shows in the rain, and my gear gets covered in water. The weather sealing has been great, and I have never gotten any water damage on my camera or lens when shooting in the rain. The previous Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 lens was not weather-sealed, and I had some water get into my camera with that lens before, so I love this aspect of the new lens.

The last aspect that I want to talk about with this lens is flaring. I shoot a lot into bright lights at shows, and if a lens can flare, it will flare up in those conditions. This lens handles bright lights very well. The old Tamron and Nikon lenses used to flare a little while I was shooting some shows, but I have not had a big problem with this lens. I have gotten one or two small flares while shooting with this lens, but so far, I have been lucky that the flares have added character to the photo. I am not worried about flaring at all with this lens. However, if you are looking for a lens to shoot into the sun and create some flares, then this is not the lens for you. I think the coatings on this lens handle flares exceptionally well, and I have no complaints about this at all.

This is about the only lens flare that I have gotten with the lens and I kind of like the shot. But this is a difficult lens to flare. I have very few shots with any kind of flare in it.

So, it’s time to write the conclusion for the lens. This is always the difficult part for me. I really, really love this lens; in fact, almost all the Tamron lenses that I have used at work recently have been excellent. So, trying to find a negative for this lens is really hard. The lens is sharper than all my Nikon zoom lenses, and its price is extremely reasonable, especially when you compare it to the new Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 VR lens that came out recently. It is tough and can take a few bumps. The autofocusing is great. I simply cannot think of any negatives for this lens. So, this will be the very first lens that I am going to give a perfect score to, simply based on one single fact: if I broke this lens and needed to replace it, I would buy this lens again.

Rating

Image Quality: 5 out of 5
Focus speed: 5 out of 5
Build quality: 5 out of 5

I want to thank Anil Rajappan who accepted my freelance contract and took all the product photos for me on this review.