This lens - despite it’s large extension when zoomed out - feels and looks very well made. As an all in one lens with a film camera the range is ideal, running from reasonably wide angle, to long telephoto, but with all DSLR’s other than the Canon 5D or 1Ds the range becomes standard to long telephoto - equivalent to roughly 42-450mm. Not quite so useful but still a good all round lens. Tamron lenses in general seem to have less compatability problems with DSLR’s and I had no problems using this on my Fuji or Nikon camera bodies.

Any lens with this wide a range is a compromise. It’s an unfortunate optical fact that in general with zoom lenses - the wider the range the lower the performance - both in terms of sharpness and distortion. Usually you can also expect a fair amount of vignetting at either end of the focal length scale. Modern techniques have gone a long way to at least reducing these problems and the LD in this lens’s name means it has a some low dispersion elements in the design to combat these problems.

I bought this lens to use on a holiday - I didn’t want to carry lots of heavy expensive glass around - and that, I’m sure, is the reason most people will buy something like this. How did it perform? Better than I expected - especially at the wide end.