Being lazy

I am considering the 18-250mm as a walkabout lens to avoid having to change lens and so that I don't carry another lens when I go on holiday.
A few weeks ago George (Lazarette) you said that you would not consider such a lens - why? What do other people think about such a lens? The other lens I am considering is the 55-300mm. Any opinions on that?

Thanks in advance.

Howard

The Tamron 18-250 is an absolutely amazing lens. Its quite sharp, quite good at controlling CA and distortion. It is incredibly versatile, and very very useful for all sorts of applications.

I recently discovered another "galazy" of image quality by purchasing the 16-50mm f2.8, but in the "normal zoom's" galazy, the 18-250 is very very highly considered.

Hope this helps!

Nathan

Howard,

There is no doubt that a single lens is very convenient, and for exploring a new town on holiday, or climbing a mountain, it might be just the ticket.

But a zoom lens is a compromise, and the larger the zoom range, the greater the compromise will have to be. It's obvious if you think about it.

In addition to lower image quality, zoom lenses will always be significantly slower than prime lenses, and the greater the zoom range, the slower the zoom will be (all else being equal). There ARE semi-fast zooms (not necessarily in K-mount), but they are invariably big, heavy and expensive.

My rule of thumb used to be that a zoom should not have a greater range than three times the shortest focal length, but nowadays four times is probably OK. The excellent Pentax 24-90 is nearly four times, and it's quality almost rivals a prime. But it is, of course, quite slow.

So, for your purposes, why not? Although I would question how often you really need such length in a walkaround lens.

As an alternative, I would consider the new 17-70.

G