Tamron sp 35mm f/1.8 di Vc Usd £599/$599

The Tamron 35mm strikes an appealing compromise between speed and quality. It does weather pretty well too…

when buying a prime lens, you often need to choose between a fast aperture rating or image stabilization. Typical of Tamron’s recent primes, this 35mm fullframe compatible lens combines a reasonably wide aperture rating of f/1.8 with a 4-stop image stabilizer. You can’t get quite such a tight depth of field as with an f/1.4 lens of the same focal length, but there’s not a great deal in it.

The Tamron is larger and heavier than Canon’s competing 35mm f/2 stabilized lens on test. Still, it weighs in at under half a kilogram and feels well balanced on Canon’s APS-C format bodies, where it gives the same effective focal length of 56mm.

It’s quite something that we’ve got this far into the group test before featuring a weather-sealed lens. In fact, the Tamron is something of a wet weather specialist, as it also features a water-repellent fluorine coating on its front element. In other respects, build quality feels marginally less solid than in the Sigma lenses on test but still very robust nonetheless. As with the Sigma lenses, an optional USB dock is available for fine-tuning and applying firmware updates.

performance

Despite having a narrower aperture rating than f/1.4 lenses, the Tamron delivers smooth bokeh, which it combines with good sharpness. In our test sample, however, sharpness was a little lacking at apertures of between f/1.8 and f/2.8. In other respects, image quality is great, with minimal colour fringing and negligible distortion.