October 1, 2008. I received my Tamron lens today and added a B&W UV-haze filter. The following photos were taken with my tripod mounted Nikon D90, set for "jpeg normal" and aperture priority at F8. After taking the 18-270 photos, the lens was swapped to the Nikon 18-200. I didn't have sufficient time to match mm with mm, so I just eyeballed the settings and started shooting. There was no post processing.
NOTE: Enlarged files are over a 2.9 megabytes each.
TAMRON 18-270:
18mm 35mm 42mm 50mm 70mm
100mm 185mm 200mm 270mm
NIKON 18-200:
18mm 35mm 50mm 135mm 200mm
October 1, 2008: Photography is one of my hobbies and I expect expert comparisons from the Pros will be available soon. Having the lens for just a few hours here are my initial findings:
1. I believe my Tamron is at least equal to the Nikon 18-200 in picture quality.
2. My Tamron has the same "lens creep" as the NIkon. The Tamron has a Lock switch at the 18mm position for walking around.
3. My Tamron zoom mechanism has a slightly annoying resistance at the 70-100 mm spot. If the camera is pointed down, the zoom is smooth, suggesting more of a design compromise rather than a mechanical defect.
October 2, 2008 hand held shooting, indoors, with and without flash:
1. My subjective rating is that the images look sharp, with excellent color and contrast.
2. The VC stabilization seems to work very well.
3. The slightly annoying resistance at the 70-100 mm spot is smoothing out just a little bit with use, but is still noticeable.
4. I didn't notice this while I was outdoors yesterday in good light, but my Tamron is slower to focus on some targets when compared to the Nikon. Sometimes it seems to take almost 2 seconds to focus.
October 2, 2008 FINAL REPORT: In my opinion, the Tamron 18-270 is a great daylight lens. It is sharp over the whole range, color and contrast are excellent. Unfortunately the slow focus in less than bright light is a show stopper for me. My Nikon 18-200 had no problem quickly focusing in the same light where the Tamron was slow to very slow.
I have returned the Tamron 18-270 today, got my money back and bought a Nikon 16-85. I put the Nikon 18-200 on my D80 and the Nikon 16-85 on my D90. The D90 was the only camera used to compare the Nikon 18-200 and the Tamron 18-270 for these webpage photos.
END OF REPORT
