Tamron is a third-party lens manufacturer, which has produced excellent lenses in the past. This offering is the 10-24mm lens, designed to replace the company's first wide-angle lens exclusively for crop-frame cameras -- the 11-18mm. The lens is available in Nikon, Canon, Pentax, and Sony mounts. It is extremely well-priced in comparison to the manufacturers' own lenses, as this Tamron 10-24mm lens review shows.
Pros
- Little distortion
- Resistant to flare
Cons
- Soft at wide open apertures
- Soft in the corners at all focal lengths and apertures
Tamron AF 10-24mm f3.5/4.5 Di II LD Aspherical (IF) Lens Review
Tamron introduced this lens in 2009 to specifically work with crop-frame cameras (APS-C). It's a great lens for those on a tighter budget, offering good quality for a cheap price tag. It does have its drawbacks, but it is a great budget lens.
Build Quality
Considering the price, it's perhaps not surprising that this Tamron lens has a plastic body. However, it does have a metal mount. Because it's quite a compact lens, it doesn't actually feel that fragile, instead feeling sturdy and well-built.
Autofocus
The Canon and Nikon fits of this lens feature a "micro-motor" based system for autofocus, which allows the lens to be used automatically even with older Nikon cameras, such as the D40 and D60. The autofocus on all fits is by no means earth-shatteringly fast, but it is a considerable improvement on some of Tamron's longer focal length and telephoto lenses. It's unlikely, however, that anyone using a wide-angle lens is looking for ultra-fast autofocusing.
Optics
Sharpness, at least when the lens is wide open, is somewhat soft, but this improves dramatically when you stop down by a couple of f-stops. The lens maintains a softness at the extreme edges of the image at all focal lengths and apertures, but this is limited to a very small area of the frame. A tiny crop in post-production will solve the issue in no time.
The Tamron's big selling point, in my view, is the fact that it doesn't seem to suffer from the barrel distortion common in many other wide-angle lenses. It's also at its sharpest at its widest focal length of 10mm, which will alone be enough reason for many to buy it.
In Conclusion
There's not much to fault with this lens when it comes to a good budget buy. It feels more substantial than its build quality should suggest, and its optics aren't bad either!
It isn't the best wide-angle lens ever built, but it does provide an extremely good value and, with a little care, you'll shoot great images with it.