tsdevine
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I think what I notice the most, I always seem to have less foreground depth of field to work with compared to several of my primes. But I'm very happy with how the lens performs.
amv8 wrote:
I've been testing the 28-75mm G2 and wanted to share some findings. A little history first. I used the first version of this lens on a photo trip back in 2019 (it was a rental from lensrentals.com). I was generally comparing it to the Sony 24-105 G that I had at the time. I thought the corners on the Tamron G1 were quite soft and decided not to purchase the lens. More recently, I purchased my first Tamron lens, the 70-180mm and have been very happy with its performance. I was excited when the G2 was announced and hoped that the image quality would be improved from the first version as claimed and pre-ordered a copy. As mentioned in other posts, my initial copy of the 28-75 G2 had some skew issues, but different than what @tschopp@ is seeing. In my case, if I focused on the center target of a flat wall, the left side, especially the upper left was blurred. But if I focused on the upper left target, that section was pretty sharp and the right side of the image went out. I also compared it side by side with a second copy which was much better.
As I shoot primarily landscape, I've been testing my second copy against other lenses that I have at similar focal lengths 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 75mm. All of these tests were done shooting the same general scene with subject focus between 10 and 30ft and manual focus.
First I compared the Tamron at 28mm and 35mm with my Sony 16-35 GM. This turned out to be much more challenging than I expected as I was getting results that didn't initially make sense to me. Finally, with additional experimentation I realized a couple of things. At 28 and 35mm, the 16-35 GM exhibits focus shift rearward when stopping down and has field curvature where the outer edges curve towards the camera. The Tamron does not exhibit noticeable focus shift and has a much flatter field. At the point of focus, The Tamron equals the GM at 28mm and is sharper at 35mm (the 16-35mm is not considered as good on the 35mm as on the wide end). The Tamron is very sharp when the focus point is in the central area of the image. As far as the rest of the image (edges/corners), they both seem good but are hard to direclty compare because of the focus shift/field curvature. The Tamron showed a little bit of CA in a couple of spots with highlights with the default profile correction.
At 50mm, I compared the Tamron with the Voigtlander 50mm Lanthar APO f2 as did @tsdevine. At the point of focus, they are almost indistinguishable. The CV APO is a little sharper at the corners, has a bit better contrast, and has a little more apparent DOF at any given aperture. Also, I think the CV APO did a bit better handling some very bright highlights which I expect is due to the APO nature. The two lenses were surprisingly close in performance though.
At 75mm, I compared to my Tamron 70-180mm. They both performed very similarly, except that the 70-180mm was a tad softer at f2.8.
In summary, I'm very impressed with the 28-75mm G2 and plan to keep this lens (but do check your copy as a couple of us on the forum have already seen significant variations in performance). Given its low weight, it should make a great travel lens. With that said, there are some downsides to the 28-75mm G2 compared to other lenses that you should be aware of:
- The lens does not say "GM" on it
- Given the price, you may not be afforded the opportunity to "justify" your purchase to a spouse, partner, or photographic colleague
- Tamron plagued this lens with fast, quiet autofocus, so you could be at risk of losing your purist badge
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