DA* 50-135mm vs Tamron 70-200mm Comparison and Shootout

*heliphoto* · 02-24-2009, 12:17 AM

It was rainy all day today, and I needed something to do while the boy was napping... so I fell to this

.

We see the questions all the time... "which should I buy?" Which is a question I asked before getting the first one, but now having handled both it seems such a silly question - they're so different, they're almost incomparable.

Pluses for the Tamron:

much more tele reach
much better "macro" ratio/magnification
slightly sharper (photos below for those who doubt - though you'll still doubt - I know you )
you can fit your hand in the hood to put on and remove the lens cap
tripod collar
six year warranty

Minuses for the Tamron:

much bigger
noisy focus
much bigger
lacks quick shift

Pluses for the DA*:

smaller / less intimidating when pointed at someone
SDM / quickshift focusing
weather sealed
50mm is very handy indoors or when mixed in to the crowd (weddings etc.)

Minuses for the DA*:

annoyingly small hood / hard to put cap back on (wah... wah.. I know)
"long end" is still pretty short (for me)
close focusing capability very lacking (1:5.8 according to B&H)

If I had to give one up...

If I were a wedding shooter, I'd hem and haw and give up the Tamron... The Pentax is well suited to event shooting as long as you can get in fairly close when needed.

Since I'm more of a landscape / nature shooter... I'd drop the Pentax if necessary. The closer focusing and the longer long end are both sorely missed when I use the Pentax, and these are areas the Tamron shines in (I'd miss the wx. sealing though

).

Unless I get a layoff notice or let this itchy LBA trigger finger do something rash, I'll keep both and have options

.

Chorus: "Enough with the blah blah blah josh! Show us the Pictures!" - Ok, ok, hold your horses... First an apology - they're really boring pictures. Like I said it was raining, and I needed to stay close in in case my boy woke up, so I set the tripod up on the front porch and shot at a piece of a broken ceramic planter which I propped up about 10' away. It was a dark and stormy day so I boosted the ISO to 640 and still was getting exposures of almost 1/2 second at f/8 (f/8 pictures aren't posted here yet, but they're available). To try to avoid camera shake with these long exposures, I used the two second timer and a cable release. Still, out of the 48 shots in the gallery, I think a few exhibit motion blur - oops...

Focusing was handled by letting the camera AF on the same point for all configurations. This does open up the possibility that one lens is front/back focusing which would mess up the sharpness results, and to this I can only say meh! It's true, but I'm not a lab tech and there's only so much rigor you can get out of me before I just go read Rupert threads over on the other forum

. I've compared these images side by side in Lightroom (that compare function is great for pixel peeping) and for most of the shots, any weakness noted is consistent throughout the distance range (ie if one lens is weaker than another, I can't find a point where the reverse is true as would be the case if the focus points were different).

I'll post f/2.8 comparisons at 70mm, 100mm, 135mm, and 200mm (using the kenko 1.5x TC to get the 50-135 to 202mm). These are screenshots of 100% or 1:1 pixel peeping, but they're 1280 or so px. wide and I'll post 'em with imagwide tags so you won't be seeing 'em full size - should work though anyway...

Here's the scene w/ a 70mm FOV (the center focus point was used for all shots and placed on the second glaze chip from the right on the broken shard (if that makes any sense)...