Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8: The Threshold of Horror

Let's have a look at the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, or Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 Aspherical LD XR Di SP if we're being precise. I was about to say that the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 has a longer name than top actress and film-maker Isabella Rossellini, whose full name is Isabella Fiorella Elettra Giovanna Rossellini, but that's not true because Isabella Rossellini's name is either three characters longer or exactly the same length, depending on whether you count / and . and - as characters, which I do, the end.

What do all those characters mean? Tamron is the name of the company. Tamron was founded in 1878 by a Peruvian man called Michael Simpson who had a dream in which snails could be harnessed to transport cargo. The company now makes lenses.

This particular lens isn't spherical, it's a tube. The rest of the name is something to do with assembly language programming. If you type LD XR Di SP into an industrial computer something happens. I don't know. It's just marketing bumpf. The lens is supposed to have special, digitally-integrated low-dispersion extra-refractive glass and one of the elements is aspherical and it focuses internally instead of expanding and it's special, but in a good way, but the same is true of every other lens Tamron makes so what's the point?

Dear reader, if you had letters after your name, what would they be? I would have the letters ST for super-terrific and K for knowledgeable and W for witty. In the real world some people have letters after their name to indicate that they have special properties, such as for example Sir Antony Arthur Acland KG GCMG GCVO, who is made of pottery, and Sir Colville Norbert Young GCMG MBE, who in addition to being governor-general of Belize can set things on fire with the power of his mind.

Was it Zeiss? With their T coating? Back in the early years of the previous century Zeiss and Leica gave their lenses names - Tessar, Summilux, Biogon, Elmar and so forth - and then Zeiss added T to indicate the special Zeiss multi-coating, and it snowballed from there and now lenses have largely meaningless strings of characters. Please stop talking.

The Tamron 28-75mm f/2/8 etc is a popular general-purpose zoom lens for film and digital SLRs, notable for its combination of full-frame coverage, f/2.8, and modest price. It's also notable for its surprisingly good performance, although the build quality is uninspiring. It focuses internally, but the inner tube / front element extends at 75mm and I'm always worried that a sharp tap will jam it. It's plastic, including the filter thread. My copy had some plastic flashes - little hairs of spurious plastic, a byproduct of the manufacturing process - around the rear element. I had to pluck them out (carefully).

The lens was launched in 2003. On a historical level it's a paradox - a cheap full-frame lens launched during the death whimpers of the 35mm film SLR, and yet Tamron's adverts pointed out that the coatings were optimised for digital sensors even though in 2003 there were only two full-frame digital SLRs*. Perhaps Tamron believed that there was going to be a market for affordable full-frame digital cameras in the near future, and wanted to get in on the ground floor. Nonetheless the 28-75mm's f/2.8 aperture seems to have been powerfully appealing to APS-C photographers, notwithstanding the odd 42-120mm range in that format.

* Three if you count the Contax N Digital, but the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 was never sold for the Contax N mount. The handful of Contax N users might have enjoyed it - the system never had a fast general-purpose zoom.

Zoomed to 75mm on an old Canon EOS 50E film camera. Nikon doesn't have a problem with third-party lens manufacturers but Canon refuses to hand over their lens mount data, so the likes of Tamron, Tokina and Sigma have to reverse-engineer it. Historically Tamron and Tokina have had better luck at this than Sigma.

I've owned my Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 for six years. I was going to write about it a long time ago but I decided to take some pictures with it first. I went over the mountains yonder and kept going, and then I came back to find that my hometown was small, and nothing there would excite me any more. The lens appealed to me because firstly I hate spending money and secondly I'm not usually a fan of general-purpose zooms. General purpose zooms are portrait lenses that aren't long enough or fast enough; they're landscape lenses that aren't sharp enough or long enough; no amount of technical trickery will conjure the look of 35mm f/1.4 from a fast zoom; they're ungentlemanly; you have to spend a lot to get good performance. Next paragraph, bored with this paragraph.

What's it like optically? Sharp in the middle at f/2.8 at all focal lengths except 75mm, but even then it's pretty good, generally good in the corners stopped down to f/8. Here's a chunk of scenery at 75mm f/8, with a polarising filter, shot with a full-frame 21mp Canon 5D MkII:

One thing. The Tamron 28-75mm has a 67mm filter thread but I found that even a slim polarising filter vignetted, so I used a metal 67-72mm step-up ring and an ordinary 72mm filter instead. Given that the lens has a plastic filter thread this is probably a good idea in general. It saves wearing out the plastic.

Another thing - there are lots of reports on the internet of sample variation and inconsistent performance, with several reviews pointing out that one side of their lens was sharper than the other. I'm not surprised. The build quality isn't that bad, but at 75mm the inner tube wobbles a bit, and I wouldn't be surprised if the internal components have relatively loose tolerances. Mine is slightly softer in the left-mid-upper part of the image, which is tolerable because I usually don't put things in that part of the frame except sky and clouds. Here's a 100% crop of the centre at f/8:

You can see the radio mast, and a bit of grain. I shot it at ISO 200 with Canon's "highlight tone priority" setting, which seemed like a good idea at the time but in retrospect was not. Bear in mind that this isn't a test chart; we're looking through a polarising filter and a mile of turbulent air. Here's the extreme bottom-right corner, with no sharpening but a tiny bit of CA correction:

It's good enough for me. Two hundred years ago, before the invention of photography, I would have simply looked at that scene. I wouldn't have thought about how to present it for an audience of strangers on the internet. I would have looked at the scene and walked away and no-one would ever have known; or I would have sat and painted it. Painted the hill and the trees and the church and the empty fields around it. Think of how horrible it was before Facebook and Twitter. People lived lives without meaning, without value. They just lived and died and ended up buried somewhere and no-one remembered what they did. If I had been born two hundred years ago my gravestone would now be landfill beneath a housing estate.

But provided you subscribe to me and hit the like button and also donate to my Patreon, my life now has meaning, and so does yours! We're not just going to die and be forgotten. One thousand years from now my blog will still be cherished by an audience of millions, and so will you! Women will imagine what it must have been like to meet me. Men will wish they had been me. Also, I do voiceovers. I own a Neumann U47 FET and a pop-shield. The guy who does Forgotten Weapons doesn't own a pop-shield.

The lens focuses quite closely at 75mm, and the bokeh is surprisingly good at that aperture.

At 50mm or so the bokeh isn't as good, however. This is the thing with general-purpose zooms. You either use them at 24mm or 70mm, so why not carry an ultrawide zoom and a compact telephoto and a 50mm or 35mm f/1.4 instead? Because you'd be walking everywhere with a backpack, that's why. Unless you use a compact camera, but then the image quality isn't as good. But what does it matter given that some of the most iconic photos of the modern age are shot at close range with an iPhone? Depression, uncertainty and doubt are constant companions of the photographer.

More mountains at 28mm also f/8:

In the centre:

And the corner, which falls apart a bit in the last hundred or so pixels, but I have seen worse:

I have seen worse. I have seen so much worse. The threshold of horror has no lower limit. That's what keeps me going. The knowledge that no matter how bad things get, I am still at the top of the slope. Heading downhill, but the same is true of the other passengers. They are heading downhill as well. We are all heading downhill together. All of us, together.

Unusually for a thing featured on my blog the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 is still on sale. I think. Tamron's UK website doesn't list it, but it's still available online. Tamron also sells an image stabilised 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom, but it's a lot more expensive.

The 28-75mm f/2.8 is or was available in Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and Minolta/Sony full-frame lens mounts, the latter particularly odd given that neither Pentax nor Konica Minolta had a full-frame digital SLR in 2003 (Pentax had once had been having a full-frame digital SLR, but nothing came of it). The Nikon version originally had an aperture ring and screw-driven autofocus; a later revision took away the aperture ring but added an internal motor so it will focus on Nikon cameras that don't have a screw drive. This may be true of the Pentax version as well, I'm not sure.

Does the 28-75mm make any sense? Yes, provided you don't have a track record of bashing your lens against things. In the UK at least Tamron has a five-year warranty. Tamron reverse-engineers the Canon EOS lens mount system, but as with Tokina I've never heard of Tamron lenses failing to work with EOS cameras. This very lens focuses and works perfectly well in both ordinary autofocus and live view on my 5D MkII, and my old 10D, and for that matter my EOS 50e film camera. Brand new the lens sells for £300-400, on the used market it appears to halve in value before diminishing to zero if it breaks; of course two broken Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8s could have bought you a single excellent-condition used Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L but that's up to you, the end.

Vivitar 28-85mm f/2.8-3.8: Waves of Fear

"I know where I must be", shouted Lou Reed, "I must be in hell". Back in 1982 critics hailed The Blue Mask as Lou Reed's comeback from a long period of aimless meandering, but nowadays it tends to be overshadowed by his other comeback record, 1989's New York. After Blue Mask Lou Reed released three anonymous, undistinguished albums that essentially squandered all the critical goodwill he had earned. None of them were a disaster on a par with Dirty Work or Press to Play, or Landing on Water or Never Let Me Down, instead they were just bland non-entities.

Wikipedia's entry on New Sensations is illustrative. "New Sensations is the thirteenth solo album by Lou Reed", it says, and that's all it says, because that's the entire article. Wikipedia isn't generally known for the quality of its writing, but I agree with its assessment of New Sensations. It didn't have to be that way. The 1980s was Lou Reed's for the taking. After years of obscurity The Velvet Underground were hip. But when I think of Lou Reed in the 1980s I think of this famous commercial for Honda scooters, which is a tremendous example of its art but did nothing for Lou Reed (or Honda):

"Waves of Fear" is the high point of The Blue Mask. Here's a written description of Robert Quine's fantastic guitar solo: eww-weee-eww-weee / aaa-aaa-yeee-eee! aaa-aaa-aa-aa-aa-AAAAAAaaaaaAAAAA wwweeeeee! etc it's skronk, baby. It sounds like animals in the forest fed through a guitar amplifier, today we're going to have a look at the Vivitar 28-85mm f/2.8-3.8 MC Auto Variable Focusing zoom lens. It dates from the early 1980s, perhaps the late 1970s. Manual focus, available for all the popular lens mounts of the day. Why did I buy it? It's unusually wide and fast for an old zoom lens, and I wanted to try it out on my Olympus OM-1 film camera.

It's a big lens. The purple multicoating was typical of Vivitar lenses. As was the fashion back then it has a complicated load of multi-coloured numbers and lines that indicate something or other.

Mine is for the Olympus OM system. Most of the pictures in this post were taken ages ago with an Olympus OM-1 but I've also used it on a Canon 5D MkII with an adapter. It's a big heavy metal lens with a one-touch mechanism. You push it forwards to zoom in, pull back to zoom out, twist to focus, and as you focus it zooms a little bit and the control ring moves quite a lot. It's awkward.

My example has zoom creep, so if I point it up or down it zooms of its own accord. It's loose, like an old person's sphincter. Imagine trying to have sex, but just as you're getting interested you start leaking faecal matter involuntarily. That's why old people are so angry and crotchety all the time, and also why they smell so bad. They no longer have control of their bodily functions. Who has control? As a baby you do not have control of your own body; as an adult, you gain a measure of control; as an old person you gradually lose control again, and then your body turns on you and kills you. Such is the course of human life. People fight to gain control - over the world, over their tribe, over their families, and over their bodies - but they are doomed to fail.

The 28-85mm wasn't actually built by Vivitar. The company imported Japanese OEM designs and sold them under the Vivitar name, although in the 1970s it took a more active role by issuing specifications for its posh Series 1 range. The 28-85mm was never sold as a Series 1 lens, although it feels Series 1-ish. It was originally built by Kiron and there is a Kiron-branded version with a slightly different body. The same soul in a different body. The theme of gaining and losing control runs through the work of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick; Kubrick's films are full of powerful men who believe themselves to be in control of their destinies, but are in fact entirely at the mercy of fate, whereas Cronenberg's films concentrate on the visceral nitty-gritty of physical degradation and death. Photography itself is all about control. Control of exposure, of the development process, of the collective cultural heritage of humanity, of future generations' perception of our present. Control and the failure of control in a world where objective truth has been replaced with subjective narratives.

The official Series 1 general-purpose zoom was a 28-90mm f/3.8 model made by Komine. It was sold alongside the 28-85mm for a time. An advert in the Feb 1983 issue of Popular Photography gives a price of $109 for the 28-85mm, vs $139 for the 28-90mm. I learn from the New York Times that $109 in 1983 would have bought four and a half smoked rainbow trout from Murray's Sturgeon Shop, giving the 28-85mm a trout index of 4.5. In comparison, a Nikon F3 body had a trout index of 14.3, and the average new car in the United States in 1983 had a trout index of 416.

Making a comparison with modern prices is hard because Murray's now lists smoked trout per fish (at $17.95) rather than per pound, and the shop sells ordinary trout rather than rainbow trout, but assuming that two prepared ordinary trout equals 1lb of fish meat and given that the average cost of a new car in the United States was roughly $33,000 last year, I conclude that the trout index for a new car in the United States is now 926. That's better, isn't it? It means that trout is much more affordable. So the economy is actually doing very well. Zerohedge is full of rubbish. Thank God they re-elected Reagan. All those agit-prop lefties from the 1980s were liars.

The 28-85mm focuses closely at 28mm and backs off as it zooms in, with a noticeable jump in the minimum focus distance in the last 10mm or so. Optically it's better than I expected, with the caveat that it's larger and heavier than a couple of prime lenses, especially compact OM primes. It's sharp in the middle at all apertures at 28mm, decent in the corners once stopped down; at 85mm it has a soft glow wide open but sharpens across the frame stopped down; wide open at 28mm it has a tonne of vignetting. It benefits from a contrast and saturation boost. For all of the images in this post I was either contra-sun or standing in shade, so I can't judge the flare. I've tried shining a light into the lens from the corner of the image, and although there were flare spots it didn't seem particularly flare-prone which is odd given the large front element. Perhaps the multi-coating is unusually effective.

The spec is advanced for the period. Most first-party general-purpose zoom lenses started at 35mm and f/3.5 or so. I have the impression that third-party manufacturers were more interested in zoom lenses than first-party manufacturers, perhaps because it was an unexploited niche and zoom lenses felt a bit cheap and dirty. Even today, in 2016, zoom lenses still have a slightly seedy air. The stereotype is that gentlemen use prime lenses, the common man has a zoom.

Still, let's see how it performs on a Canon 5D MkII full-frame digital SLR. Here's the vignetting at 28mm. There's a lot:

At 28mm it's basically sharp in the middle wide open, slightly sharper at f/8, but in general there's nothing wrong with the performance in the centre. NB for all of these images I have applied Photoshop's auto contrast, but I haven't added sharpening:

On an APS-C camera it would be a 44-135mm, an odd range that borders on usefulness. In the APS-C corner it has noticeable but correctable CA, and decent sharpness (again at f/2.8 then f/8).

Alas there was nothing interesting in the full-frame corner except some brickwork. As before there is a lot of vignetting wide open and the performance stopped down is okay:

The lens peaks at the middle of the range. At 50mm-ish it's basically sharp in the middle at all apertures, sharp all over at f/8 (again, wide-open and f/8).

At 85mm there's a soft glow wide open, although there is detail underneath the glow. Stopped down to f/8 it's actually very good.

At f/8 the corners improve substantially, although the lens would be outclassed by a decent 80mm portrait lens. The CA is mostly replaced with light purple fringing on high-contrast edges, not visible in this sample:

And that's that. Does the lens make sense nowadays? Not really. The kit lens you got with your digital SLR is probably just as sharp, and although it might not be faster it has image stabilisation. The problem is that unlike old prime lenses, old zoom lenses tend to be very large and heavy, and for video work the 28-85mm's zoom creep is awkward. It would be completely unbalanced on a mirrorless camera, for example.

On the other hand I would have been thrilled with it in the early 1980s. As a general-purpose zoom for 35mm cameras it makes a lot more sense. But then again a 28mm prime and some footwork would have been almost as useful. The lens is however surprisingly good for a nigh-on forty-year-old third-party zoom.