Super wide-angle lenses bring a new dimension to photography. Their practical benefits are obvious: they enable you to shoot architectural shots in confined spaces, for example, and capture broader, wider vistas in landscapes. There’s much more to it than this, though. Super wide-angle lenses introduce extremely strong perspective effects, radically altering the visual relationship between foreground and background objects and offering the potential for some striking visual effects. Even if you buy a lens like this solely for its practical value, you need to be aware of these perspective effects.

Actually, although super wide-angle lenses get the blame for strong perspective distortion, that’s not strictly fair. It’s where you stand and how you angle the camera that produces these perspectives. Super-wide lenses simply enable (and encourage) you to get much closer to your subjects than would otherwise be possible. Foreground objects look proportionally much larger as a result, and the slightest tilt of the camera produces strongly converging verticals.

The Tamron equates roughly to a 15-36mm lens on a 35mm camera. That’s pretty impressive given that it’s about as wide as super-wide lenses get and has a 2.4x zoom range – most super-wide zooms have just a 2x range, like Canon’s EF-S 10-20mm, for example, or Nikon’s 12-24mm. Yes, there’s only a couple of millimetres in it, but that makes a big difference with focal lengths in this range. The 2mm advantage the Tamron enjoys over the Tokina 12-24mm, say, is equivalent to the difference between a 15mm and an 18mm lens, and represents quite a significant advantage in terms of angle of view.

The worry with any super wide-angle lens that pushes the boundaries of both zoom range and price is that the optical performance might be below par. That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case here. The resolution values obtained in our tests are fractionally below those you might expect from a standard kit zoom, but they’re still well above the threshold where images start to look visibly softer. The differences might show up in laboratory conditions, but they’ll be very difficult to spot in real-world photography.

Besides, resolution is only one factor in good lens performance. Aberration control and consistency are vital as well. Too many wide-angle shots are spoiled by poor edge definition, chromatic aberration and barrel distortion, and at the same time you don’t want to have to keep trying to shoot within a lens’s ‘sweet’ spot, avoiding lens apertures where the performance falls below par.

The Tamron does show some chromatic aberration near the edges of the frame, but it’s not particularly serious and you’ll often get more from a kit zoom. Its distortion control is remarkably good, though. Images shot at the minimum focal length do show noticeable barrel distortion, but a good deal less than you’d get from a kit zoom at its shortest focal length. This distortion diminishes as the focal lengths increase, so that by 24mm the level of distortion is negligible.

You also get extremely consistent resolution across the zoom and aperture range, and across the frame. There is some drop in definition at wider apertures right at the frame edge, as you’d expect, but it’s not serious. Similarly, there are slight variations in definition with focal length, but these are so small that they’re only going to show up in technical measurements and are not at all obvious otherwise.

This lens handles well, too. Many photographers will be considering a third-party lens like this because it’s a good deal cheaper than the makers’ own alternative, and wondering therefore if the build quality is up to scratch. However, there’s no need to worry in this case. The exterior finish is very good, and there’s a real feeling of precision and solidity about it. The zoom movement is smooth with no tight spots, and there’s a big focusing ring at the front marked with a clear distance scale. The front element doesn’t rotate during focusing, which is a big advantage for photographers who use filters extensively though while the 77mm filter ring isn’t excessively large, the lens’s wide angle of view means that your existing square filter holder might not be large enough to prevent vignetting.

The lens contains its own AF motor, crucial for owners of Nikon D40/60 cameras that no longer have AF motors in the body. Focusing is fast and quiet as a result, though the focus travel is surprisingly long for a lens with such short focal lengths. The Focus ring is both broad and very grippy, and lies right where you tend to place your hand when shooting there’s a lot of torque in that motor and it can be off-putting to have it twist under your fingers, though you do soon learn to modify your grip.

To sum up, this is a very well-made lens at a good price, that’s nice to use and delivers very good, very consistent results. If you’re looking for a super wide-angle lens that doesn’t cost as much as own-brand zooms but still delivers great results, give this a try.

Final Verdict There’s a good choice of third-party super wide-angle lenses for today’s DSLRs, and this new Tamron is perhaps the best yet OVERALL

Our lens reviewer, and technical expert, Rod is a veritable photographic encyclopaedia. His illustrious CV has seen him write for many mags, websites and journals.