In 2018, I reviewed the Tamron 70-210mm f4 lens for Canon EF mount. This lens back in the day was pretty affordable, and it can still be had at affordable prices. These days, Tamron has made a 70-180mm f2.8 lens — but the lens I’d truly love to see make a return is the 70-210mm. It gives us so much more reach and is also a whole lot more versatile. That, and these days, I’d argue that we don’t need an f2.8 zoom. If I need something that fast, I’ll just switch to a prime lens instead.
In the DSLR days, Tamron lenses didn’t focus all that well. But when mirrorless came around, they started running laps around everyone. Of course, this lens is back from the DSLR days and originally developed for Canon EF.
So what made this lens unique? Well, the colors were unlike anything that we’d seen for Canon. These colors are muted by today’s standards and when combined with the optics that are just sharp enough, you can really fall in love with what this lens can do. If adapted to a higher megapixel camera today, there’s a whole generation of photographers who would say that the lens doesn’t resolve the sensor. And that’s wrong. The lens resolves the sensor, but it doesn’t have output that’s as sharp as newer lenses. And that’s just fine.
Do you believe that at the time, I wrote that the colors are vibrant? And truly, they were for the time when everyone else was developing lenses for you to do a lot of post-production to images later. Sigma and Sony still embrace this mentality. But we adapted it to a Sony E mount camera, and found that we got super vivid and punchy colors.
This is why camera companies put skin smoothing into so many of their cameras. I mean, why can’t they just make lenses like they did back then?