Tamron 18-250mm Macro Lens
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I spent a month with this lens and did a lot of playing around and trying my hand at comparing this lens to a couple of other lenses I own and found the lens does the work of two lenses. The lens can do the close in work of a macro pretty well for my product shots as well as those great outdoor shots of wild critters and not so skittish wildlife like flowers.
You can also get those panoramic vistas and great scenic shots with the wide angle features of the lens when you want to shoot landscape and nature pictures. The A18 model lens does a wide range of jobs and is the perfect consumer priced lens for all around photography in a small package.
I would have to say this lens makes the most sense for an all around lens that does a wide range of tasks in photography from the close in work of macro to the portrait work or family shots at those holiday events. The lens does even better for scenic and wide angle shots like outdoor pictures while vacationing without having to lug around a camera bag full of lenses.
The lens has a lot going for it and has the focal length from close in at 1:3.5 macro to the near 400mm focal length for zoom situations. I found that comparing this lens to the Canon 75-300mm Zoom lens and the 18-55mm standard lens is just not fair, two lenses should be able to do a better job than one but the Tamron held its own.
I spent a few weeks doing some comparison shots checking for resolution quality, vignetting, distortion and overall lens quality and was very pleased with my results. While I am by no means a professional photographer I can take pictures and do pretty well at comparing two pictures using the different lenses.
I started by taking some distance shots and compared images for overall zoom quality and resolution quality and was happy at the Tamron lens and how well it captured the sharpness. I took pictures of a building that is about ¾ of a mile away and compared the images when I cropped sections out and checked the Canon and Tamron lenses.
The Tamron lens was a bit better in quality and sharpness at a distance and brought out the buildings corners and edges well, I also took some shots of a waterfall from about a half mile distance and cropped the same size pieces out of the images and pasted them together. The pictures included with the article here show the two pictures taken at the same settings and time but with the Canon 75-300mm and the Tamron 18-250mm lenses.
From the two images I have included the Canon image taken at the same settings is a bit brighter and a bit sharper but the Tamron lens did pretty well overall. This shot is taken from about a half mile away and I did a close up crop 3 inches wide by 2 inches tall from a 59 inch x 35 inch original.
I next checked for distortion by taking pictures at various focal lengths to see how bad the distortion and obvious bowing in the pictures would be. At lower focal lengths or from 18 to about 25mm you have obvious distortion of vertical and horizontal lines like on a brick wall. From 35mm to 40mm there is very little distortion and by that 40mm there is almost none, so very little that it is almost not discernable on the images unless you use the straight edge of the window on your computer.