Have you heard about the new 70-200mm F/2.8 G2 lens, from Tamron? It’s a great lens! I’ll fill you in, today on The Slanted Lens.
(Please shop our affiliate links with Amazon and B&H- we’ll get a small kickback which helps support new content on the channel. Thank you!)
Tamron 70-200mm F/2.8 G2 Lens
I was excited to hear that Tamron updated their 70-200mm lens. I had the old one and loved it; it’s a fabulous lens. So I wanted to take the G2 out and put it through some tests to see how it would stack up. I wasn’t disappointed.
Vibration Compensation
The Tamron 70-200mm has three basic Vibration Compensation modes. Mode 1 is best for video and standard shooting. It strikes a balance between stability of the viewfinder image and stabilization effects. In Mode 2, used for panning, the lens tracks subjects in the viewfinder, and won’t attempt to stabilize while you’re panning the camera. Mode 3 is great for shooting stills, as it prioritizes the stabilization of captured images over the viewfinder image. The Vibration Compensation kicks in only as the image is taken.
Comfort
I love that Tamron added an Arca Swiss plate to the bottom of the new 70-200mm. It makes the lens comfortable to hold. With a lens of this size, that’s important when you’re hand holding it. And then of course it’s very easy to mount the lens on a tripod, as the plate is already there.
Autofocus
This lens is equipped with an auto focus setting that lets you choose whether you will use the full field of view, from the minimum object distance to infinity, or not include the closest range of distance (only focusing from 3m and beyond). 
It was fast to focus, and the fact that you can get as close as 3.1 feet is an added bonus.
Bokeh
The bokeh on the 70-200mm is really pretty. It’s a circular bokeh that looks really nice in the background.
Focus Breathing
Focus breathing is an issue that affects some zoom lenses. When it happens, the angle of view changes as you change focus on the lens. There’s a shift you can see within the frame. We had a lot of questions about this, so I wanted to test it out. I didn’t find it to be a very big deal on the Tamron 70-200mm G2 lens. At 70mm there wasn’t any focus breathing happening. When I went to 200mm there was a little bit of widening and collapsing, but nothing that I would consider a deal breaker.
Sharpness
This is a sharp lens almost right through the full focal length. It did lose a little bit of sharpness at 200mm, but overall it is a fabulously sharp lens into the F/2.8 range.
Conclusion
The new 70-200mm F/2.8 G2 lens from Tamron is a great lens. Tamron made some nice improvements in this second generation. My only complaint is that it focuses like Nikon lenses, not Canon lenses. But that’s not a deal breaker for me. I’m planning on getting another one, because it’s great go-to lens.
Thanks for watching. Keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.
– Jay P.