Advice? Looking at this lens...

[emma_01]

Hey there!

I was wondering if any of you have bought equipment from this site...I'm looking at this Tamron lens for my cannon. Comments? Suggestions? (I'm on a low budget if you can't tell! )

AF276C700 Tamron 75-300mm f/4-5.6 LD AF Macro Auto Focus Zoom Lens with Hood for Canon EOS - with 6 Year USA Warranty

[ceremus]

First off, you shouldn't have any trouble buying from Adorama, they have a good rep.

Hard to find reviews for that one, but the price tells a lot of the story. It looks similar to the Canon 75-300mm, if they're optically similar it means that your images are going to be soft, and chromatic aberration (purple fringing) is going to be a major issue. Also it is not a macro lens, at a 1:3 magnification ratio it's not even close.

If you really need a telephoto lens and this is the extent of your budget you can try it, I probably wouldn't recommend shooting at anything less than f/8 to coax decent sharpness out of it, so that will regulate it strictly for outdoor shooting in the daylight.

For something like this I'd rather see a Canon 70-300mm IS USM, the image quality is bound to be better, plus it has a stabilizer which will come in much more handy for use as a walkaround lens. It's more expensive, but for good reason.

I've sort of gone down this road myself, I bought a discontinued Canon 100-300mm lens to get my feet wet in the telephoto territory. You can find it on the used market of Adorama or B&H for around $200 or less. The image quality isn't stellar, a little worse than the 70-300 from Canon, but not by much. I also learned to love to shoot at f/8 to get decent sharpness, and it's actually pretty quick to focus being a USM lens, so it had that going for it.