Thank you John for a very practical review of this lens's impressive performance. I find that my K-3 with the 16-50 DA* lens produces fantastic 3D results, but it is simply not as reliable as the K1ii/24-70 combo at fast accurate focus and nailing the shot.
I think is a good lens optically speaking as it is sharp and has very little focus breathing. It gets the job done. It is heavy but building quality is superb. It survived without any problem a 1-meter drop to concrete from my clumsy hands. I use much more the 50 and 100 mm macro primes as they are sharper and brighter. I mean that at the same aperture they are brighter.
I use to think the same thing about primes being better till I got the sigma 18-35mm 1.8 . I'm willing to bet it will beat any prime from 18- to 35mm . Watch the videos with the pro's comparing the primes to the sigma 18-35 zoom lens . It beat every prime lens they put against it .
The Tamron is now G2 so they are at the second version, one of the major advantages over the G1 lens is the USB dock compatibility, this allows the firmware to be updated as well as comprehensive focus fine tuning and limited switch function customisation. The G2 has enhanced VR (not of consequence for Pentax owners), supposedly faster AF performance and a nice modern design update (again the Pentax lens was aesthetically more pleasing than the G1 Tamron IMO) , optically improvement, if any, is negligible. The Tamron lenses are also WR (all the seals appear to be in the same position), it's not just marketed as heavily as Pentax. Eddy might just tolerate the Bokeh ;)
If VR is the main improvement then I can see why Pentax hasn't bothered. The USB thing is an interesting concept but I'd be surprised if Pentax were to embrace it unless they could come up with something Pentax specific that could be made to work with most of the other current range.
@@JohnJBloomfield I suspect that the electronics is one of the main elements in the design that differentiates the two product lines and being a dedicated lens I don't expect Pentax to go down the route of providing USB access to their lenses any time. The Tamron VR is excellent BTW, but the lack of ability to auto level is sorely missed by me at least.
And that s why you buy a quality uv filter ... you just decreased the resale value of your lens significantly and in backlighting situations those mark will matter
