Tamron 16-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD Macro £430/$500

IT REALLY PUTS THE ‘SUPER’ INTO SUPERZOOM

This Tamron has a bigger zoom range than any other lens available for Nikon DSLRs, and delivers a major bonus when it comes to wide-angle shooting. It’s the only superzoom that shrinks to a 16mm rather than 18mm focal length – equivalent to 24mm rather than 27mm on a full-frame camera. It can therefore shoehorn a lot more of a scene into the image frame.

Unusually for an ultrasonic motor-based autofocus system, the focus ring remains stationery during AF, and also enables full-time manual override. Handling is therefore just as natural as with the Nikon lenses, and the lens features a focus distance scale positioned beneath a viewing panel.

Performance

Compared with the Sigma 18-300mm, the Tamron is slightly less sharp at 100mm, but sharper at 200mm. Both lenses deliver similar sharpness at other focal lengths. The only downside is that the Tamron has worse colour fringing, but this is automatically corrected in recent Nikon DSLRs anyway.