Tamron 17-70mm F2.8 Review

The Tamron 17-70mm F2.8 is one of the best selling lenses for Sony APS-C cameras… and it’s for good reason. On paper, it’s everything you’d want: a versatile zoom range, bright aperture, and a solid price.

Although I’m typically a fan of primes, I decided to rent it out for a couple of weeks to give it a try. In this article, I’ll be sharing a couple dozen sample photos plus my impressions onto whether or not I think this lens is a good buy (spoiler: there may be better options). Let’s roll.

Image Quality

First off, let’s talk about what everyone actually cares about the most: image quality. Now, my lens tests don’t get super scientific, as in you won’t see any crazy MTF graphs or sharpness charts. I much prefer to actually take the lens out, shoot a bunch of photos with it, and decide from real-world experience if it’s any good.

At the widest end of the focal range (17mm), you’ll see pretty great centers that have quite a bit of corner softness at F2.8. Stopping down a bit fixes everything up, and images start to look really nice and even at F5.6 and above.

Mid-range at 35mm is when things generally improve a bit. You’ll see marginally better corner softness shooting at F2.8, but overall a bit more clarity from edge-to-edge when stopped down. At 70mm, we see pretty much the same thing.

Now, one thing I want to make abundantly clear is that the sharpness that this lens produces is “good enough”. Compared to a good prime, it’s of course going to be worse, but if you’re coming from a cheap kit lens, the difference is staggering, and it’s only if you pixel peep to the extreme that you’ll notice anything.

There are, however, two optical issues with the Tamron that I think are worth pointing out. The first is distortion. When you zoom in a good bit, distortion is minor and barely noticeable. However, at 17mm, you get some wicked barrel distortion. This can largely be fixed in post-processing.

Vignette, I think, is a bit of a larger problem. Now, I do typically enjoy a light vignette, at least when I’m photographing center-focused subjects (ie. portraiture, cars, macro). This lens, however, suffers from pretty noticeable darkening of the corners at F2.8. During my test period, I shot a lot at night and indoors. When you’re already shooting at F2.8|1/50s|7500ISO in some dark venue, a strong vignette has more of a negative impact.

Let me explain: when editing my night/low-light shots, I noticed that there was heavy noise in the corners thanks to Lightroom having to fight against the major vignette shadows. Thankfully, the new denoise feature was able to mostly clean them up. So, while I wouldn’t necessarily say this is a dealbreaker by any means, it’s worth noting especially if you like to shoot indoors or at night often.

Those two optical anomalies aside, the lens is pretty clean. I found virtually no chromatic aberrations nor any substantial issues with flaring.

Build/Usability

Moving on to what I personally feel is the weakest part of the lens: the sheer size & weight. Now, I know plenty of photographers couldn’t care less about having a heavy kit, but downsizing was the biggest reason I switched away from a bulky DSLR so many years ago. Using this lens felt a lot like using my old Canon zooms (and that’s not a good thing, dear reader).

I spent a lot of time aimlessly wandering the city with this lens, and while it wasn’t as bad as some full-frame zooms (RIP to my wrist) that I’ve used, it was cumbersome and a bit annoying. Most of the time I’ll just hold my camera so I can have it ready to roll in a second, but with this lens I found myself often tossing it in my bag to give my wrists a break.

My complaints aside, a big reason why the Tamron is so heavy is that it’s just simply well built. I’m no lens engineer, but even a pleb such as myself can tell that this thing is built pretty well. Sturdy materials, big heavy glass, and a good “feel” in the hand really lend themselves to making this lens feel a bit more expensive and premium than it actually is.

In addition to the solid build quality, the lens also is weather sealed to a degree! We had a weird streak of great weather in my area so I wasn’t able to fully test its limits, but it has a gasket around the lens mount and a good amount of internal seals. Just a friendly reminder: make sure your camera is ALSO weather sealed.

Autofocus

Autofocus works pretty much as well as you’d expect. There’s not too much to say here as almost every modern lens is stupidly fast and accurate. As I mentioned earlier, I shot a lot in dark conditions and not once did I have missed focus or excessive hunting.

For my fellow video shooters, know that the lens has pretty much no focus breathing and the image stabilization works excellently. Usually I can’t shoot slower than 1/60th due to slightly shaky hands, but with the Tamron I was able to handhold easily in low-light.

Conclusion

So, this lens is pretty awesome, right? But here’s the caveat: I kept asking myself, “why am I not just using the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8?”. The Sigma creates marginally better images, is cheaper and, most importantly, substantially smaller and lighter. The big drawback, of course, is that you’re losing that 70mm max range which can be a dealbreaker to some.

For myself, I don’t tend to zoom in that much anyway nor do I enjoy attaching a proverbial brick to my camera, so my personal preference between these two lenses would be the Sigma over the Tamron.

However, if you a) don’t care about the size/weight and b) really want that 70mm focal length, then the Tamron is still absolutely spectacular. In case it wasn’t obvious, I loved the lens, and my only complaint was the size.

Regardless of what your preference is I’ll drop links below so you can check ’em both out. Feel free to read my full review of the Sigma. Thanks ya’ll, and let me know what you end up choosing. 🙂

Buy the Tamron or buy the Sigma <— note that these are affiliate links, which means I get a (very) tiny commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the website and my work. <3