Canon and Tamron Lens Tests

I decided to have a little lens shoot-out since the weather cleared up a bit today, and once again, the Tamron 28-75 proved why it's rated so highly among photographers. My test shot setup was simple: I shot from our back porch into the back yard, testing my lenses at 28mm, 50mm, and 75mm — and I did shots with the 40D set to Program mode, as well as a forced shutter of 1600 for each. My interior tests were done using aperture priority set to 2.8.

The lenses I shot with were:

• Tamron SP AF28-75mm F/2.8 XR Di LD
  
• Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM
  
• Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM
  
• Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM (the interior shots, only)

Let's tackle the outdoor shots, first. All of the outside shots were taken at 28mm, and what you're going to see are 100% zooms in Photoshop of the section way back in our yard. Here's the source pic so you can see the depth:



Let's take a look at the Canon 17-55mm lens:


Here's the Canon 28-135mm:


And finally, the Tamron 28-75:

Even looking at the scaled-down shots, you can see the Tamron has a lot more saturation, and the Canon 28-135 is pretty washed-out compared to the other lenses. More importantly, though, is that the Tamron is producing a sharper picture. Open the images full size and take a look at the chimney in the background — you'll see that the Tamron is rendering the edges with a lot more clarity than the Canon lenses are. The fact of the matter is, there's really no comparison, and I'm somewhat disappointed in my Canons. =/

Obviously, this is nit-picking, and if I wanted a good shot of that chimney, I wouldn't be taking it at 28mm from 50 yards away. However, the sharper the image, the better, and the Tamron beat the Canon lenses without question in my opinion.

Let's now go to the test I was most looking forward to: my depth of field test at 50mm. In this one, I fully expected my 50mm Canon prime to win the day — but the ol' Tamron literally slaughtered the competition, as you'll soon see. As I said earlier, I set the 40D to Aperture Priority, forcing the lenses to f/2.8. I focused on a lamp shade 2 feet from the lens and let plenty of background in the field of view. Here are the long shots...

The Canon 17-55mm:


The Canon 50mm:


The Tamron 28-75mm:

Once again, the Tamron produced a better image with a lot more bokeh. To better show this, here are crops of the globe in the above order:






As you can plainly see, the Tamron wins hands-down in the depth of field shootout as well.

So what does this mean? It means I've nailed-down my walk around lens of choice, seeing as how the Tamron takes better shots, from landscape to portraits. It also means I'll be investing in more Tamron lenses in the lengths of my current Canons — then I can do some real apples-to-apples testing. It also means to not give up on a lens (like I almost did) until you've really taken the time to explore its possibilities.

I know the above all seems really short and sweet, but this post is a quick summary of several hours of work and 42 test shots, just to make the point I did. My main goal was to determine what lens to pull out of my bag since I have some overlap, and this testing let me know that the Tamron needs to stay. I encourage you all to test your lenses in the same way, and, without a doubt, to try out Tamron's goods.