Check out this crazy small and lightweight 70-300mm telephoto zoom lens by Tamron for Sony. In this hands on review Jay P shows you picture quality, reviews the lens specs, tests auto focus capabilities and more. Let us know your thoughts and if this would be your choice in telephoto lenses. SEE THE VIDEO HERE!
Today on The Slanted Lens we are here in Canyonlands National Park and I brought with me the 70-300mm new Tamron lens for Sony. This is the world’s smallest and lightest 300mm capable telephoto lens for full frame cameras. It’s small and compact. This is a 300mm lens. It’s fabulous. It’s so small and so compact. It is a f/4.5-6.3, which is about a stop and a third and that variation from 70mm to 300mm. We’re going to be an Arches and here in Canyonlands. We’re just going to shoot away and see what we get. One of the things I’ve been really impressed with already is the focusing distance, how close you can focus, it’s like 31.5 inches, which is incredible. It allows you to get very close. As I stand here I can focus on the dirt at my feet with 300 millimeters! So this follows the same form factor of all the Sony lenses as they keep them very lightweight and very, very compact. In order to accomplish that you have all of your controls in the menu of the camera. So if I want to go from manual focus to autofocus, I change that in the camera. I hit the FM button and change that very easily in the camera. It’s an easy way to work so you don’t have that switch on the lens. That makes it smaller and light more lightweight. Also you have in camera stabilization. I don’t have it in the lens but the camera and lens work together excellently. So it’s very lightweight. It’s 1.2 pounds and it’s 5.8 inches. I got a polarizer on here so that makes it look longer than it is. It’s not that long. It’s very small and compact and is one of the smallest if not the smallest telephoto lenses for 300 millimeter that you can get out there.
I really enjoyed shooting with this lens. I’ve had a little time to work with it. It is a full frame lens, made for full frame sensor and it can be used with an APS-C sensor. It will just give you a crop factor of like 105 to 450. It works seamlessly with all the Sony functions in your camera like autofocus, the chromatic aberration corrections for lenses and lens corrections. I mean, all of those are going to work seamlessly with this Tamron lens. You may want to update your older cameras. Your older Sony cameras, make sure they have the current firmware update to make sure everything’s going to function absolutely seamlessly. I’ve had no problems. I’m shooting on an a7R III and it has worked flawlessly, it really has. So Tamron uses in all these the RXD stepping motor, it’s the same motor they use in all this series. It’s very quiet, it’s very quick, and it talks with your camera. So it takes advantage of all of the different functions of your camera as far as autofocus. All those autofocus features work seamlessly with the Sony camera. That’s what it’s made for.
You should see the shot I did of the moon. I just looked at the moon and clicked an image off. I was astounded. I mean it’s 300 millimeters. It’s not like it filled the frame. But when I punch in on that shot of the moon it’s pretty stinking sharp, pretty amazing. So who’s this lens good for? It’s excellent for sports. It really is a great sport lens, anything from soccer to football. Any type of sideline sports is going to be great with a 300mm lens. It’s also great because I love the fact that you can get an in context with 70 millimeters, like I did with the climbers. And then a really tight shot so I can get in and see the people actually on the rock. So like those two different options with a lens like this, when I did the bicyclers that’s exactly what we got there. I was really tight as they came around the corner. And then I could zoom way out to that 70 millimeters when they got a little jump in the foreground. That really was excellent. The lens worked excellently with the internal autofocus on the Sony. I had the little square as Sonys usually do a little further away. But as it got closer, it picked up the eyes and started to eye track as it got a little closer. You know it’s got that f/4.5-6.3. If you wish you had a f/2.8 lens like this, that would be wonderful, but it would be about that big around. It would be a huge lens. So that f/4.5-6.3 is actually a pretty nice setup. And when you get to 300mm if you’re in very tight, your background falls nicely out of focus and the bokeh is beautiful.
The most important thing is picture quality. Let’s look at some of the images and get a really good look at the picture quality from this lens. The edge to edge sharpness seems really incredible. It seems great both on the 70mm and the 300mm. Let’s look at some comparisons of those. Here’s one at 300 millimeters and then we enhanced it. There’s something at 70mm, then we enhanced it. So there’s a look at the sharpness and the quality.
So this lens falls in the category that every photographer and videographer wants and that is a lens you really want to have. But sometimes you can’t justify the expense. When it comes into $550 it really makes this lens more achievable. There’s other lenses out there that are like $1100. This puts it in a category that you can afford the lens you’d like to have without breaking the bank.
Alright, let’s wrap this up. It really stood out for me that it really works so well with the autofocus features of my Sony camera. It eye tracked. It did all the things that I really needed it to. I love the fact that I could reach out and isolate things and I can get more in context at 70 millimeters. So it just covered a lot of different bases for me. So you tell me in the comments on our YouTube channel, would you choose this 70-300mm or the 28-200mm that we shot over in Yellowstone? So which one would you choose of those two if you had to choose only one? It would be great to have both but if you could only choose one, which one would you choose. So leave me a comment. Make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube.com/TheSlantedLens and keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.
