by Klaus Schroiff, published February 2021 Introduction Tamron has been an early adopter of the mirrorless concept so it’s not surprising that they are offering a vast number of corresponding lenses across most segments by now. One of them is the Tamron 17-28mm F/2.8 Di III RXD. Tamron is following an interesting philosophy with their fast f/2.8 zoom lenses. While Sony and Sigma (ART) are embracing high-performance priority, Tamron is going for compactness and low weight – which is certainly an attractive proposition for many buyers. And light-weight f/2.8 zoom lenses are an even rarer breed. Just to give you…
Author: Klaus
by Klaus Schroiff, published February 2021 Introduction The Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 Di III VXD is a member of Tamron’s own “holy trinity” of fast f/2.8 zoom lenses with the other ones being the recently reviewed 17-28mm f/2.8 and the 28-75mm f/2.8.These 3 lenses share a very similar philosophy – they are smaller, much more light-weight, and also more affordable than comparable lenses from other manufacturers. This is especially true for the 70-180mm f/2.8 which has a rather radical design comparable to the Canon RF 70-200mm f/2.8 USM L IS with the Tamron lens going even further in some respects. At…
by Klaus Schroiff, published January 2021 Introduction Over the last few years, Laowa has created an arsenal of ultra-wide prime lenses across all relevant systems – and they are still looking for further niches in this segment. They just released the Laowa 10mm f/2 Zero-D MFT. Those who have followed their journey may be a bit surprised. After all, they are also offering a 7.5mm f/2 MFT and a 9mm f/2.8 which aren’t all that old either. However, not everybody needs an extreme wide-angle lens and a 10mm lens (“20mm” full-format) is easier to handle. Beyond the paper-specs are some…
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Introduction Canon has been THE dominant player in the super-telephoto arena for decades. There are many photos of sports events where you can see a myriad of white Canon L lenses in the press section. Besides lots of prime lenses, Canon has always offered moderately fast long tele-zoom lenses, with the most popular one being the EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 USM L IS (II). However, during recent years this lens felt a bit conservative regarding a competition that moved on to 500mm and even 600mm at the long end. And for sports/wildlife photographers, nothing beats a long focal length but a…
by Klaus Schroiff, published November 2020 Introduction Fast standard zoom lenses are incredibly popular in the photographic community – yet the surrounding design challenges in this lens class are about as tough as they get. To date, we haven’t reviewed a single lens of this type that was truly outstanding (on high megapixel cameras). However, that doesn’t mean that they are trying. One of the latest contenders is the Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 DG DN ART. Sigma wasn’t OVERLY successful with their previous attempts so let’s see whether there’s progress in the mirrorless world. The lens is available both in Sony…
by Klaus Schroiff, published September 2020 Introduction Super-tele zoom lenses have been around for many years in the DSLR world. Especially Sigma and Tamron have a long history of providing several different and also interesting designs up to xx-600mm. Interestingly, the OEMs never dared to go there to date. However, such lenses were not available for mirrorless systems … that is until the release of the Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS. You may think that such a lens from Sony is pretty much unaffordable – and for many users, it’ll be out of reach indeed – but it’s actually…
by Klaus Schroiff, published September 2020 Introduction Laowa has explored many extreme lens designs ever since they started in 2013. So far they have focused most of their efforts on either ultra-wide or macro lenses. With the inevitable demise of the DSLR segment, many of their latest lenses are now targeting the current sweet spot of the market, thus full-format mirrorless cameras. Just prior to the review, they released a set of 3 quite insane prime lenses – an all manual 9mm f/5.6 FF RL, an 11mm f/4.5 FF RL, and the Laowa 14mm f/4 FF RL Zero-D. The latter…
by Klaus Schroiff, published August 2020 Introduction Laowa has released a couple of very interesting lenses over the last years. Like many other Chinese players, they are focusing on rather extreme designs. Their 24mm f/14 2x Macro Probe is probably the most exotic one and quite famous in the video community by now. And regarding their more conventional macro lenses, we were very impressed by their recent 65mm f2.8 2x APO Ultra-Macro for APS-C mirrorless cameras as well as the 100mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO full-format lens. However, Laowa hasn’t forgotten about the Micro-Four-Thirds (MFT) community. So in this review, we are…
by Klaus Schroiff, published August 2020 Introduction During recent years, mirrorless lenses suffered from a disease – they got bigger and heavier. In fact, many mirrorless lenses are now more obese than their “former” DSLR counterparts despite all the marketing palaver promising the opposite. Of course, this happened for a reason. As a rule of thumbs in optical design, bigger and more complex is usually better – or it’s at least easier to achieve certain goals.While this was all cool for a while because there were simply too few mirrorless lenses available, most consumers are no longer demanding “any” lens…