Thanks for watching. Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you my review of the new Tamron 90mm f2.8 Di3 macro VXD lens. Really, there's only one thing that has surprised me about this lens and that it has taken so long to arrive. Tamron has been making 90mm macro lenses since 1979 and I have been really noticing for all of the lenses that release on Sony E-mount and there are constantly lenses being released. But what I've noticed is how few autofocusing macro lenses they are.
In fact, the last time I did a review of an autofocusing macro lens on E-mount was back in 2020, and that was the Sigma 105mm DN macro lens. So while we have just massive amounts of lenses available on E-mount, we really have had relatively few good macro options. And so it is great to see this arrive because this is a killer combination here. The Tamron 90mm f2.8 Mac macro VXD lens. It's optically fantastic.
That VXD autofocus motor is fantastic. It has a great formula to its build and it arrives at a price tag of just $699 US dollars. Also, very interestingly for Tamron, this is the very first of their lenses to arrive simultaneously on both Sony E-mount and Nikon Z-mount.
Z-mount shooters you have been accustomed to having to wait with quite a delay between the E-mount release and then the Z-mount release. And so it's fantastic to see this lens arrive simultaneously for both platforms. So is this a lens worth buying for you? Well, we're going to dive into that right after a word from our sponsor.
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That's FlexiSpot.com. So starting with the build design and handling here, this lens is a DI3, which is what Tamron uses as a designation as being designed for mirrorless. It is a one-to-one macro lens, and it has their VXD or voice coil extreme torque drive autofocus motor system.
The kind of chief competitors here on Sony, where I'm reviewing, tend to be the Sony 90mm f2.8 G macro, and then that aforementioned Sigma 105mm. F2.8 macro. This lens is just very slightly smaller than either of those lenses.
It's 79.2 millimeters in diameter or 3.1 inches. It is 126.5 millimeters in length or 5 inches. One thing to note about the length of all three of these lenses is that all of them are internally focusing lenses so they're a little bit longer because nothing is going to extend in and out during focus.
The lens weighs in at 630 grams or 22 ounces making it very slightly heavier than the Sony, but about 70 grams lighter than what the Sigma is. It has a 67 millimeter front filter thread, which Tamron has done an admirable job of sticking to that standard. And so the vast, vast majority of their lens releases over the last five years are all standardized around a 67 millimeter filter thread wherever, you know, physically possible. And so that means that you can do a lot of filter sharing across Tamron lenses.
Design language is pretty typical from what I'm seeing from Tamron right now. They've upgraded the overall outer shell. It's got more sculpts and, you know, shape to it. We've also got more, a few more features here as they have kind of expanded even on these, I would say, kind of their average tier of lenses.
This is not their premium, but they've allowed some of those features to trickle down from some of the premium lenses here. So we've got a raised bank here that has a function button and I'll... Detail a little bit more on that in just a second. Then we've also got a three-position focus limiter.
And so you can either lock into just the... macro range up to 70 centimeters. You can lock out of the macro range for faster autofocus for other things. So 70 centimeters or 0.7 meters to infinity, or you can just engage the full.
I suspect for most of you, most of the time, you're going to be able to leave it in full because autofocus, as we'll see, is really, really snappy here. So as mentioned, this focus hold button or function button, you have the typical option of being able to program that from within the camera itself. However, because this lens also has a weather sealed USB-C drive on the side, that allows you to connect it to either a PC or an Android device and use Tamron's lens utility software to customize a number of features here. So that includes assigning a specific value to this lens in the lens utility software, which means that that will override whatever you have programmed from the camera itself.
Now you can set it to just use whatever the camera function is. But it may be that you want a specific function for this lens. To be able to set that unique from the camera setting, I think is quite appealing here.
Even more importantly, however, in that lens utility software, you can thoroughly tweak the behavior of the focus ring. That's huge on a macro lens. If you have a preference about which direction you prefer focus to go, you can choose that.
You can choose whether you want it to be linear or non-linear. You can choose how much focus throw you want on the manual focus ring. So just a lot of various options there that I think are going to really expand the functionality of the lens itself.
Now I noted that the USB-C port is weather sealed, but so is everything else on the lens. We have a gasket at the lens mount, we have a flooring coating at the front element, and we have six other seal points throughout the lens itself. So a professional grade of weather sealing that is there.
Now a first for Tamron is that inside we have 12 rounded aperture blades. They typically go with more like a 9 aperture blade count. So it's nice to see that increased aperture blade count. For one thing, it does help to maintain a really nice circular aperture shape. Even when stopped down, this is f5.6 for example, you can see those specular highlights are still nice and round.
Also, when you have an even aperture blade count, it means you also have that equal even blades of your sun stars. So in this case, a 12 pointed sun star. You know, it's okay.
It's not amazing looking or anything, but I mean, it's an improvement over what we typically see from Tamron's typical apertures here. Minimum focus distance is 23 centimeters, which gives you a little bit of working distance at one-to-one, not a ton, but you can get nice and close there. And of course, it is one-to-one or a 1.0 times magnification level. Now, one thing that I will criticize is that there is no AF-MF switch here. Now, To be fair, one of the things you can do with that function button is you can program it to be an AF-MF switch.
And so if you click it, you'll switch between autofocus or manual focus. But of course, it just means that you can't use that for a different function. I would prefer to just have a dedicated AF-MF switch, but of course, that's not here. Again, as noted, the price is $699 US dollars. That undercuts Sony by about $400 in their own 90mm macro lens, making this a...
pretty fantastic value. Now as you've probably already heard me hint at, autofocus I think is quite exceptional here. Tamron's VXD motor is a very good focus motor and I've noted that on a number of other reviews, but it really stands out here when it comes to an application on a macro lens.
Macro lenses sometimes do focus a little bit slower and it's understandable when you actually manual focus and realize that there are a tremendous amount of focus possibilities in a macro lens that just don't exist. and a lens without very close focus abilities. So the fact that this has blazing auto focus is really quite impressive. And I would say that this may be the fastest focusing macro lens that I have ever used before, which is pretty impressive.
I know to right out of the box that this lens was just really snappy, out just shooting around with it before it even done any kind of dedicated test, just general purpose shooting, and it really stood out is that, wow, that auto focus is just nailing it very, very quick. And as you can see here, either indoors or outdoors, that focus speed is pretty close to instantaneous. It's able to make those focus transitions without any kind of hesitation or slowdown.
And of course, the fact that the focus is confident means that even when you have it in full and you don't have the focus limiter on, I didn't see one instance where it did that big rack throughout all of the macro focus possibilities, but rather it was confident and it was smart enough to where it didn't back into the macro range if it didn't need to. So overall, autofocus performance was really excellent. Now, in this shot, you can see I was able to acquire a bird in flight. And while the shot itself is very unimpressive, 90 millimeters isn't nearly long enough for birding, particularly bird on the wing. But what stood out to me is that I was able to just...
Snap up from my hip, you know, this being on a strap because a bird was flying overhead, and just immediately acquire it with like no hesitation at all. So just again, it speaks to the overall confidence here. You can also see that the ability to track the eye is very, very good, very stable on the eye.
I did use it briefly as a part of another portrait session, and I got really nicely focused results. And again, focus just locked on, and it delivered the results that I wanted without any kind of hesitation. I also found that I was able to get really good focus precision when using it for shooting macro.
Now obviously when shooting macro you're going to want to get as small a focus point as possible. If you want to use AF to give you some precision, frankly a lot of times if I'm working in the macro range I like, I prefer to just shoot in manual focus anyway because it allows you to have that little bit more pinpoint precision and so but your mileage may vary. The fact of the matter is that focus well at manual focus distances as well.
Now switching over to the video side of things, I found that video autofocus was also excellent. You can see in these focus pulls that they're confident moving back and forth without any kind of hesitation. They're very smooth, no visible steps, no settling or pulsing, all positive.
Their focus breathing exists but it's not particularly strong for this kind of focal length. I also found in my hand test that it was able to make those crucial transitions back to my eye very snappy and then transition to the hand. when I wanted to do that. So no problems there. I would say that the quality of the autofocus here for either video or stills is good enough that it really expands the versatility of this lens.
This is a lens that's not just good as a macro lens. It's a really great general purpose lens. And I will say this, if you're kind of stuck between saying, well, I'd like a macro lens, but I also want, you know, maybe an 85 millimeter lens for shooting portraits.
Buy this lens because it will give you great results for shooting portrait work, but it also gives you that just extreme versatility. I've been able to get in really close and shoot macro level details. It's a very nice wetting option as well for those same kinds of reasons.
And a lot of that comes down to having fantastic autofocus. So how about the image quality? I will give you a quick overview here. And then if you want the optical deep dive, as always, it's at the end of the video.
So you can stay tuned for that. This is an optical design of 15 elements in 12 groups for those being low dispersion elements. As noted, Tamron has been making 90mm macro lenses for a long, long time at this point, about 45 years.
And so as a byproduct, they do know what they're doing on this front and it really shows. The MTF chart shows results that are a little bit better than either the Sony or the Sigma lenses. Very good center performance, excellent mid-frame performance, and there's a little bit of drop off towards the corners, but in a very typical kind of way for a lens like this.
I found in real world results that I probably... felt like the corners were a little bit better wide open than what the MTF chart suggests. And you can see here that all across the frame, my crops, even at a 200% magnification on a 61 megapixel body, they look really quite excellent. I found also in stopping the lens down a bit, a little bit of improvement by f4, a bit more by f5.6. And then that stays about consistent with a little bit of fade at f11.
Diffraction becomes very obvious at the minimum aperture of f16. delivering the softest image quality results of the whole aperture range. Now, when I tested for vignette and distortion, I found somewhat surprisingly to me that there was a bit of barrel distortion there. Not a lot. It only took a plus four to correct, but I was just surprised that it existed at all, and even more surprised that it was barrel rather than pincushion distortion.
Now, vignette, on the other hand, is really pretty much a non-issue. I used just a plus 27 to correct in the corners, which is just over a stop. Not bad at all. I also found that fringing was basically not, if not completely banished, almost non-existent, which was really important at macro ranges.
I find that sometimes macro lenses lose contrast if they have issues with fringing. That was not the case here at all when it comes to the lateral chromatic aberrations in the corners. They were non-existent and just the tiniest bit of longitudinal chromatic aberration after the plane of focus. I also found that the bokeh quality is really...
quite nice from this lens. For one thing, you can see from the shot with a coin at f2.8 that there's specular highlights all around. You can see just how even they are, even as it pops up towards the top of the frame.
So that was a really, really pleasant end result because it just, again, adds more versatility and so less of that geometric squeeze at the corners. But beyond that, I found that the bokeh quality in general was very, very nice. Nothing ugly that I ever saw.
I also found the colors looked very good. Again, expanding the versatility of this lens as a landscape lens, for example. I've got some really beautiful landscape shots shooting with it. I had the opportunity to shoot the night sky.
And I found that Coma was extremely well controlled. So another potential application of this lens. It works really well for that kind of application for shooting stars or obviously shooting other bright lights at night.
Also flare resistance, if not perfect, was not bad. The lens hood itself is quite deep. It's over 50% of the length of the lens itself. Another interesting thing about it is that it does have a window here. And so obviously because it's deep.
Sometimes you might want to use a circular polarizing filter shooting some macro work. This gives you the ability to rotate it without having to reach deep into that lens hood. And so another good application there.
Overall, optically, this lens is a treat, which leads me to my conclusion that this is a fantastic total package. We've been waiting a while for Tamron to bring us this lens, but it feels in many ways like it's worth the wait. It's a great combo of build and features. then autofocus and optical performance, all of that package at a very great price, giving it a very good price to performance ratio. There aren't any real optical flaws here, and it is a breath of fresh air to get such a great macro lens at this price and to get it both on Sony E-mount and on Nikon Z-mount, where I think it's going to be equally welcome on both platforms.
If you want more information, you can check out my full text review that is linked in the description down below. There's also linkage to an image gallery and some buying links if you'd like to purchase one. Now, if you would like that deeper dive into the optical performance, stay tuned. We're going to jump into it together. All right, we'll kick things off with a look at vignette and distortion.
If you see here, you can see a little bit of barrel distortion, which, again, as I noted earlier, is a little bit surprising to me. Typically, with a longer focal length, you tend to get more pincushioned style distortion. But it's mild, it corrects pretty easily, and there's only a minor amount of vignette there. I used a plus 4 to correct for the distortion here, and a plus 37 to correct for the vignette. Obviously, Tamron does get very good profile support on either Sony or on a Nikon, so that won't be an issue in reality.
Now, the ability to control longitudinal style chromatic aberrations is really huge on a macro lens. For a lot of reasons, you're working with really tiny depth of field, number one. Number two, you're also... dealing with a lot of shiny surfaces very often depending on what you're shooting so here at 200 magnification to really show any kind of flaw this is f 2.8 this is going to be worst case scenario you can see very very little fringing here there's tiny amounts of purple fringing before the plane of focus tiny amounts of green fringing after the plane of focus but as you can see even at a massive amount of magnification you really don't see it all that much and at a more typical viewing level you're not going to see it at all so This lens really passes that test with flying colors. I also noted just a really nice delineation at the edges of textures.
And so here, once again, at this leaf, you can see shiny opportunities where sun is coming right through. So these are all opportunities for there to be fringing or even some kind of blooming along the edges. But you can see it's just really crisp, really, really well done there. Likewise, when it comes to lateral style chromatic aberrations near the edge of the frame, you can see here.
Without any kind of correction, the transition from black to white is just flawless. So, zero issues with any of that. Now, that typically all adds up to a very strong contrast and resolution performance. So, here at 61 megapixels and looking at the results at 200% magnification, center of the frame looks fantastic.
Great resolution, great contrast and detail. Mid-frame is also really excellent. Just really fine delineation of all those little details.
You can see here that contrast looks really strong. We can see as we look at this bill, as I like to check as we move towards the edge, it looks strong on the upper left corner. It continues to look strong on the lower right corner. That's pointing towards a good edge performance.
And as you can see, the corners actually look better to me in reality than what the MTF suggests. That looks like a really strong performance. So that means at more typical 100% magnification levels on real world images, you're going to get great resolution results.
And so here... Again, with 61 megapixels, you can see the detail is really, really crisp. And we can see as we pan over towards the side, it is consistently good right off to the very edge of the frame. Here at macro levels, we can see that, you know, depth of field is so incredibly tiny here. But again, we can see really nice delineation of all of those kind of fine thread-like fibers there on the dandelion clock.
And then... Depth of field is, or stopping down really is more about depth of field. And so obviously in this case, I'll just kind of toggle back and forth. You can see got a nice, more nicely blurred background here.
You've got a more usable depth of field and the simple solution in many situations is just to do some focus stacking that'll allow you to retain a really soft, creamy background, but also to have a little bit more depth of field there. But you can see here, stop. down a bit that I mean obviously look great before it looks even better still and gives you a little bit more usable depth of field here at f5.6.
For portrait work here you can see overall this is this is right out of camera here that's I mean there's nothing to complain about there it looks great the resolution and detail on the skin textures look great you can see that the overall color rendition and the background bokeh it all looks really nice at Macro level shooting on my chart, you can see here that it just looks really fantastic. You can see just the individual fibers of the paper. You can see the ink drops and ink dots that make up the pattern here. Really nice, a fairly flat plane of focus. It all looks really quite good.
Here's another real-world shot here. And so you can see, by the way, the blue is from an RGB light I had on it. But you can see in the plane of focus, even at f2.8. I mean, it all looks really, really good. And, you know, I saw details on this coin that I've never really noticed before.
So if we pop back to a comparison on the test chart, you can see stopping down to F4 does boost things a little bit. But the center of the frame is pretty much perfect. So you do see a little bit more improvement here in the mid frame, which is nearing perfection. And then in the corners, you can see a little bit more pop there. At a 5.6, I think the biggest thing that happens is the natural vignette.
their lifts so contrast improves a little bit more particularly in the corners but overall the performance is really consistently good quick pop around the world you can see the detail is good on the left side as well up here into the upper left corner it looks really fantastic these corners just look better than what i typically see corners looking so overall very very impressive results i quite like f 5.6 at macro distances because it does as you can see depth of field is still really really tiny but does give you a little bit more to work with. And here, even at 200% magnification, you can see just how much detail is just popping in this image. And again, you can see just how narrow that plane of focus is.
You can see it's really not even the width of a letter on a coin. But anyway, it makes for it to be very, very useful. F8 pretty much looks like F5.6. At F11, you see just a mild bit of regression.
You can see it just doesn't pop quite as much. And then by F16, which is minimum aperture, diffraction is starting to soften the image a bit more. And so I would go up to F11.
I would probably avoid F16 in many circumstances unless you're more concerned about increasing that depth of field than you are losing sharpness. Again, I think doing some focus stacking is probably a better idea. So once again, looking at the bokeh quality here, obviously at macro distances, everything is very, very... Depth of field is just really, really shallow.
But... The 12 aperture blades and the old general aperture shape and optical design allow for really nice consistently circular specular highlights throughout the frame. And so I really like that.
As you stop down here to F5.6, you can again, you can see the geometry is really consistent all across the frame, which I really appreciate. Obviously, the specular highlights are smaller at F5.6, but they do remain really, really circular. In this shot at very close focus distance, this is a handheld macro, by the way. You can see that the macro detail on the subject is great, but the background is really, really creamy, nicely defocused.
As noted earlier, I also feel like the colors that I was able to capture with the lens just look really, really nice. Detail and contrast. This is quite a beautiful landscape lens and able to really capture gorgeous results, as you can see here. Taking a closer look at the coma performance, in the center of the frame at 100% magnification, star points are really, really crisp. and of course it's very sharp so that helps a lot very little fringing so everything stays nice and clean but as you can see even as we move right off to the edge it's one of the best coma performances i've seen in that i would say very literally the corners look basically about as good as what the center does there's just a the tiniest bit of of some deformation of the star points but overall it is a really consistently good performance Finally, a quick look at flare.
So here where I've just allowed flare to come through the window, you can see that there really isn't anything to point to. A very, very minor loss of contrast, but overall still looks really good. Here is pointing right at the sun, wide open. You can see there's a little bit of that kind of prismatic haze, a little bit of veiling there, but nothing too bad. And then if we stop down to here at F11, get a slightly more defined ghosting artifacts there.
but it's really not too bad. And of course, if you have something like this, an object coming through the frame, those sunbursts kind of, it's okay. It's not amazing looking, but overall, the flare resistance, I would say is quite good. And so there you have it. This is a great lens optically, and hopefully that deep dive has allowed you to be a little more informed as to whether or not this should be the next lens for your own personal kit.
As always, thanks for watching. Have a great day and let the light in.