Smoothly Blue by Rafro

Tamron means business with its first high-speed tele zoom in more than 10 years. This full-framer ($700, street) scales up, approximately, to a 109-310mm on most DSLRs, and as a member of Tamron's SP (Super Performance) family, was designed as a pro-quality lens. It boasts two costly LD glass elements that control color fringing and coatings to suppress flare off digital sensors. The lens makes a logical mate to Tamron's 28-75mm f/2.8 SP pro zoom.

HANDS ON: At 2 pounds, 14.6 ounces (including magnesium-alloy tripod collar and reverse-stowing lenshood), the lens might seem heavy, but it's actually lighter than most in its class. (Sigma's comparable 70-200mm f/2.8, for example, weighs more than 3 pounds, including hood.) With the petal-type lenshood in place, it's almost 11 inches long. Internal-zooming (and -focusing), at least it doesn't extend past that.

Its AF action is moderately fast, moderately quiet, and sure. Both manual-focus and zoom rings are very well-damped and even-turning. Each is textured with both knurled and ribbed patterns of rubber. Nearly 2 inches wide, the manual-focusing ring is unusually large, and well-designed for quick focusing touch-ups.

While the lens doesn't allow manual focus in the AF mode, it flips between the two with unusual ease thanks to this manual-focus ring that doubles as an easy-to-use, push/pull-type AF on/off switch. Its barrel markings are a bit unusual, though. When the switch is in the MF position, the markings that show the lens' AF/MF status are concealed under the ring....

The Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 Di Macro Lens delivers sharp images from a great focal length range and a wide/fast aperture. It is a light and economical package. The autofocus system is the clear downside to this lens.

Overall, and especially for the price, I'm very pleased with the image quality of the Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 Di Macro Lens. On the wide end (70mm), this lens is sharp wide open (f/2.8) across the entire 35mm frame. Stopping down only makes a small improvement in sharpness - reduced vignetting is the primary difference seen. By 100mm, the center is still sharp wide open, but corner softness is setting in due to a slightly curved focus plane. Stopping down to f/5.6 results in excellent image quality across the frame.

The weak spot for this lens is 135mm - especially in my first purchased-retail-new copy of the Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 Di Macro Lens which exhibited a very soft right side. This was due mostly to a curved focus plane but the left side was far sharper than the right side (examples showing the right side of this lens are shown in the ISO 12233 test results for lens sample #2). Here is a closer look at the problem that was most apparent at 135mm f/2.8.

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The bundled software disk contains Picture Motion Browser Ver. 2.1.02 for Windows, Image Data Lightbox SR Ver. 1.0 for Windows and Macintosh and Image Data Converter SR Ver. 2.0 for Windows and Macintosh. Picture Motion Browser is a general-purpose downloading and image organiser application with basic editing facilities and support for printing images and burning them to optical disk.

The application initially requires you to 'register' folders of images. It will then display thumbnails in calendar form and you can select months and days by clicking on thumbnails. It will even show the time of day in which shots were taken.

Editing facilities include an automatic correction (which covers brightness and colour balance), brightness, saturation sharpness and tone curve adjustments and red-eye correction. You can also run slideshows of shots in selected folders.

Image Data Converter SR is a better-than-average raw file converter that supports a wide range of adjustments. It also lets you change the Creative Style settings, adjust the DRO parameters and apply colour and edge noise-reduction processing before converting raw files to TIFF or JPEG format. TIFF files can be saved in 8- or 16-bit format. You can also apply several special effects, including B&W and sepia conversion, solarisation and negative conversion.

Image Data Lightbox SR allow users to display and compare raw and JPEG images recorded with the camera and rate them on a scale of one to five. It also provides a seamless interface with Image Data Converter SR for...

Beautiful moments as well as some dazzling moments can occur any time without any previous warning. At that time, everyone wish to capture those moments. Now there is an option by that one can capture the beautiful moments easily and this option is digital camera. There are many camera manufacturers available in the market. Olympus is different from all. It is to be known as one of the oldest camera manufacturers.

This camera manufacturer has completed a long journey in manufacturing field of cameras. Its digital cameras are being used all over the world today. Olympus digital camera offers variety of zoom, lenses and mega-pixels. Even though digital cameras had been offered by various other digital camera manufacturers during the 80’s and 90’s. They were not of very high quality and also were not suited for web publishing and making low resolution prints.

Olympus digital cameras are designed in such a way that users get quick right to use to most if not all features including setting flash and also deleting picture that simply requires pressing a single button. Moreover, these digital cameras also allow users to simply print pictures without the need of any connecting cable. Thus, when in the year 1996, Olympus digital cameras come in way of life, and the world of digital camera underwent a major change.

That time Olympus digital cameras together with P&S type of cameras that had an excellent motion. Continue improvement in the camera made Olympus mature and in...

Camera is an option of capturing the beautiful moments of life. Many years ago, capturing the beautiful moment was not easy. Users or photographers had to set the camera and after a boring process it was possible to capture the pictures. Now everything has changed. Continue improvements of camera have changed methods of capturing. Photography used for professional or entertainment is easy now. Digital camera has changed the methods of capturing photos and videos.

There are many camera manufacturers available in the photography market, but Nikon digital camera has occupied a special place in the photography market as well as in the heart of users. All digital cameras are good for something, but users want clear and detailed image captured by the camera. Users also want camera that should be easy to use and have a few functions like simple camera. For that Nikon digital cameras are suitable for you. Suddenly occurred actions can be easily captured with its help.

People are sure of buying Nikon digital camera because they know that they are paying for quality, durability, functionality and reputation. The advantage of these digital cameras is that it gives the opportunity to amateur photographer to have the quality professional shot. Nikon produced less expensive units of their professional cameras. Nikon houses a top camera manufacturer reputation in the photography world.

Nikon D2X is packed with all possible features, which most amateurs will hardly use in a lifetime as this camera is very expensive. Nikon D80...

Flash units can come in many sizes and shapes for digital photography. Those cameras on the lower end of the scale come with low energy built in flash units. However, some gear such as the high end digital SLR cameras can accommodate external flash units advanced in their abilities to provide excellent lighting in complicated situations. Know the basic facts about the difference between built in and external flash units.

Many advances have been made with flash units since the early days of photography. In photography's infancy, flash units were using powder that was lit by electrical current and then "blown up" to generate the light energy. This method was most certainly a risk. It also proved a challenge as the flash units were not automatically in time with the camera's shutter so the photographer had to coordinate the flash to go off at the exact time the photo was shot.

Today flash units have eliminated this challenge. An electronic flash tube ensures flash timing is synchronized to the camera. The photographer now gets to concentrate on other aspects of the photo. New digital cameras can even determine on their own if the flash is even needed, set its intensity and other parameters and fire the flash at the precise time the shutter is opened. All of this is automatically done in the background. Should the user want to make their own adjustments, digital cameras also allow the user to manually control the flash, set its intensity and...