George Schaub

When we first saw the Pentax Optio 33WR it was at a photo trade show inside a goldfish bowl...filled with water. This is not the usual or recommended storage for a digital camera, especially with all the circuits and batteries etc. inside. This eye-catching display got our attention, so we...

While the main body of my work has been with lenses such as the 24mm fixed, wide angles, and mainly my trusty 16-35mm zoom, I have often found myself wanting a long zoom for the scenes that present themselves along the way. It’s not that I am unwilling or just plain lazy to get closer—a long zoom, like the recently released Tamron 100-400mm, simply changes the way I see and helps me explore other visual options.

The 70-200mm focal length has been the standard tele-zoom choice for many years, offering near normal to a good tele range that suits many practical purposes. Yet, quite a few stock-in-trade 70-200mm lenses had been slow or lost significant aperture as soon as you left the shortest zoom setting, making them a real challenge for handheld, low-light, or even max focal length shooting. Certainly, improvements in sensors and processors in terms of the high ISO/image quality ratio have helped. If you’re too slow on shutter speed with a variable aperture zoom you can always jack up the sensitivity. But that’s not always a great choice and it seems to force you to compromise image quality just to make up for the lens losing “speed” just when you need it most.

One look at the specs of this new Tamron zoom and you'll understand why
it's immediately attractive to anyone carrying around a digital SLR in
their day bag. Weighing in at around 15 oz and measuring just under 3x3.2",
the lens is quite the marvel of size for what it delivers in focal length and
aperture options. Indeed, if someone told me that a constant aperture, 17mm
wide lens would be this size a few years back I'd have thought they had
lost their optical marbles. To be fair, however, that 17mm is not really a 17mm
in 35mm equivalent, thus practical terms, and I wonder why lenses like this
are still labeled that way. This lens is only for APS-C sensors, which means
it has the "35mm equivalent" of a 27mm wide angle view and 80mm
tele.

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