10 Minute Review: Traveling light with the Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 Di III

posted Thursday, June 4, 2020 at 2:25 PM EDT

Do you shoot with a Sony FE or E mount camera and need a capable all-around zoom lens for portraits, sports and close wildlife that won't weigh you down? If so, you'll want to watch our 10 Minute Review of the Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 Di III to see just what this lens is capable of achieving.

We started this new review series just a month ago with the svelte little Sigma fp starring in Episode #1. This versatile and lightweight Tamron zoom will serve as the first lens to receive our 10-minute-review treatment, and it's quite an intriguing offering indeed.

At just 28.7oz/815g, the 70-180mm f/2.8 from Tamron is just a little over half the 1480g weight of the Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 G Master lens, and at $1200 is less than half the $2600 price tag. And yet the only real features you're giving up on paper are optical image stabilization and an extra 20mm of reach at the telephoto end. Are there any additional drawbacks to know about? That's what we set out to find for this report, and we'll cover everything from sharpness to autofocus performance and much more.

We'll shoot the 70-180mm f/2.8 on the A7R IV to gauge autofocus prowess

We'll shoot this lens on both the high-res Sony A7R Mark IV for the ultimate in performance across the board, as well as on the APS-C Sony A6400 in order to see both the results with the 1.5x crop factor as well as what we can expect without any onboard IS. Plus, we'll put it through its paces in tricky AF scenarios such as dirt bikes driving straight at the camera and tracking birds in flight.

And we'll also see how the lens fares for close wildlife in the field

Dive into the video for all the details! You can watch our 10 Minute Review episodes on the review pages themselves, or of course on the IR YouTube channel.

10 Minute Review: Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 Di III

After watching please check out the Tamron 70-180mm image gallery, where you can find access to all original JPEG and RAW files as delivered by the camera + lens!

Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 Di III Gallery: Sony A7R IV Images / Sony A6400 Images

About our new series...

Given the growing popularity of video as a review format, we've decided to launch a new series called "10 Minute Reviews" that is basically a Field Test in video format.
We'll try and pack as much useful information into these as we can, and then
liven them up with the best examples from the real world we can capture!