Jack Neubart

I thought that Tamron had outdone itself first with its 70-300mm lens and then with the 24-70mm f/2.8  and 90mm f/2.8 Macro lenses: all bearing the SP (super performance), VC (vibration compensation), Di (digitally integrated primarily for full-frame sensors), and USD (ultrasonic silent drive) monikers. There are of course other noteworthy lenses in the lineup, but these are the ones I tested for Shutterbug. Now comes the impressive Tamron SP15-30mm f/2.8 Di FC USD, which the company first previewed way back at photokina 2014. With this lens Tamron has created a near-flawless masterpiece in optics that simply blew me away!

I’ve always preferred longer focal-length macro lenses in the 90-100mm range because they give you more breathing room between the camera and skittish subjects than does standard (50/60mm) macros. No wonder, then, that one of my earliest lenses was the original Vivitar Series 1 90mm f/2.5 macro, which I first paired with a Minolta SR-T 102. I burned plenty of Kodachrome with that glass.

The new Tamron SP AF17-50mm F/2.8 XR Di II VC LD Aspherical (IF) joins a growing community of wide-zoom lenses. In contrast to an earlier version of this lens, which is available in several mounts, this APS-C Tamron optic (designated Model B005/$649 street price) is only available in Nikon DX (with built-in motor) and Canon mounts. Given that I mated this lens to a Nikon D300, that effectively...

As billions of images are produced by millions of devices, the demand for bigger capacity storage, faster memory cards, and speedier methods of transferring huge files has become apparent. Cloud storage has become a standard offering among many camera makers; so independent cloud services have grown. Essentially branded server farms, the competition for your data is increasing, as are capacities of desktop backups.