What Photo Gear

Tamron has just announced a new ultra-zoom lens, initially available in Nikon and Canon mounts. The Tamron 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC LD Aspherical (IF) Macro covers a whopping 28-419mm zoom range (in 35mm terms) - that’s a 15x zoom!

The VC stands for Tamron’s Vibration Correction feature (similar to Canon’s Image Stabilization (IS) and Nikon’s Vibration Reduction (VR) ) - which should ideally give you a 2-3 stop advantage when hand-holding the lens.

Other features include a minimum-focusing distance of about .49m over the entire zoom range and a maximum magnification ration of about 1:35 at 270mm, on paper, this looks to be the ultimate ultra-zoom yet - the only significant potential downside so far is it being an f/6.3 towards the long-end of the zoom.

All-in-all, this looks to be quite an interesting lens for Tamron - a 15x zoom definitely has its upsides, especially if you don’t want to be carrying around too many lenses. But with Nikon’s 18-200 VR finally becoming widely available, and Canon having just announced its own 18-200 IS zoom lens, not too mention Sigma’s 18-200 OS lens - it’s getting pretty crowded in ultra-zoom territory.

This lens is scheduled for a Sept 20th release in Japan. We’ll get you sample images as soon as we can. Stay tuned.