Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 Di III VC VXD Review

Focusing Characteristics

The Tamron 150-500mm autofocuses quickly and accurately. Side by side, it was just a hair slower to focus than the Nikon Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3, but not enough that it would be noticeable if I didn’t have the two lenses directly next to each other. Accuracy was just as good as a native lens.

In dark conditions, focusing at the dim maximum aperture of f/6.7 at 500mm can be a bit of a problem. In this respect, it isn’t much worse than an f/6.3 lens. However, if you have an f/5.6 or f/4.5 lens instead (like the Nikon 500mm f/5.6 PF or Nikon Z 400mm f/4.5), low-light photography will be easier with the brighter glass. The Tamron doesn’t perform any worse than other dim lenses in low light, but it’s still something to be aware of.

Finally, the close-focusing capabilities of the Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 are pretty solid. It’s capable of a maximum magnification of 1:5 (0.2x), which is enough to fill the frame with a subject that’s about 18 cm / 7.1 inches wide (on full-frame) or about 12 cm / 4.6 inches wide (on APS-C). This isn’t true macro photography territory, but it’s enough for small subjects like many lizards and hummingbirds.

Distortion

The Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 has a little bit of pincushion distortion throughout the zoom range. Distortion is less important when dealing with supertelephoto lenses in general, unless you’re a rare supertelephoto architectural photographer. Nevertheless, here’s the graph of distortion throughout the range of focal lengths:

Even though this level of distortion might bother me on a wide-angle lens, it’s never too high. With a supertelephoto, I think it can safely be ignored.

Vignetting

The Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 is well-controlled for vignetting throughout the zoom range, whether you’re focusing close or far away. It’s worst at 400mm, infinity focus, wide open – and even then, it’s only 1.35 stops. Here’s a full chart of vignetting levels:

Even though supertelephotos usually have better vignetting characteristics than wide-angle lenses, this is still a very good result. There isn’t a focal length or aperture where I would be concerned about the Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7’s vignetting. Even if you do decide to correct it, the corrections will be easy and shouldn’t reveal a substantial amount of image noise.

Lateral Chromatic Aberration

There is a modest amount of lateral chromatic aberration on the Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7. Here’s the chart:

Anything under about one pixel is almost impossible to notice in real-world images, even with chromatic aberration corrections turned off. By comparison, this lens maxes out at 1.46 pixels of chromatic aberration, although it usually hovers in the range from about 1.2 to 1.3 pixels. (Only at 150mm is it consistently under the 1-pixel threshold.)

This isn’t a record-breaking performance, but it’s plenty good enough. At no point does the chromatic aberration rise so high that it becomes difficult to remove in post-processing.

Sharpness

The Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 has performed well in all the measurements so far. What about sharpness? I’ll share a direct comparison with other lenses on the next page of this review, but for now, here are the individual sharpness results by focal length:

This is a solid and completely respectable performance throughout the zoom range. I’m impressed by the consistency of results, with none of the focal lengths dropping off substantially (though the far corners at 500mm are a little weaker). Indeed, the sharpest focal length in the center is actually 500mm! This is in contrast to a lot of zoom lenses that get less sharp throughout the frame as you zoom in.

That said, even though the Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 never falls into the territory of weak sharpness, it also doesn’t reach the lofty heights of some other supertelephoto lenses. You can gain some extra pixel-level crispness by choosing a prime lens instead, and to a lesser degree, some zooms. How much? That will be clear later in this review, where I’ll show sharpness comparisons at various focal lengths.

Bokeh

Bokeh is another word for the qualities of the background blur in a photo. “Good” bokeh is completely subjective, since different photographers have their own preferences for how the background blur looks. That said, photographers commonly want their background blur to be soft, not distracting. Out-of-focus highlights that are round, uniform, and soft-edged are usually considered favorable.

In this case, putting a harsh background behind the subject, we find that the Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 does a good job rendering out-of-focus areas smoothly. However, the f/6.7 maximum aperture is not wide enough to throw the whole background into a creamy blur. There’s also a little bit of a cat’s-eye shape to bokeh in the corners, although nothing too objectionable. You can see all that from the following image and subsequent crop:

In short – good background blur, but not a wide enough maximum aperture to give you the bokeh that you might want.

Flare and Backlight

Supertelephoto lenses rarely do well in terms of flare and ghosting. And when the sun is directly in the frame, the Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 isn’t an exception. However, more typical backlighting conditions do not trigger any substantial flare with this lens. It retains a high degree of contrast in backlit scenes, as you can see below. I would have no concerns using this lens when the sun is low on the horizon.

The next page of this review dives into the sharpness numbers a bit more, with some comparisons against other lenses that Nikon users may be considering. So, click the menu below to go to “Lens Comparisons”: