Tamron - 18 to 200 Review

You can travel with a bag full of lenses, or you can travel with one.

I love photography, but I don't want to be one of those guys who travels with a giant bag of lenses - especially since I do a lot of traveling in exotic locations where your luggage space and carry-on can be a challenge.

For me, the ideal solution has been to trade off a bit of performance for a single lens with an extremely adaptable zoom. Back when I was using film, I had a Tamron that was about 25 to 300 mm, IIRC, but it was build to Minolta. When I switched to a Canon digital, I wanted to build on that and bought a Tamron 18 to 200 zoom.

It's been as versatile as I expected, letting me zoom in on animals in Africa or shot wide cityscapes in China (if you don't mind the smog in the way, of course). It's been very durable, with a few bumps and a fair amount of rain not bothering it. The few times I've flipped to manual focus, it's been easy to use.

 The one thing is that compared to separate lenses it is both pretty expensive (about $300, I think) and fairly heavy, both due to the mechanism to cover such a wide range. But if you'd rather put one lens on your camera and leave it for the whole trip, and still get the pictures you want, it could be the right choise for you.