70-210mm supertest; Tamron SP, Vivitar Series 1

marcusBMG · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 1305 Location: Conwy N Wales

70-210mm supertest
Which Vivitar Series 1 70-210 is the best. Or is the Tamron adaptall 19AH the best. I decided to try and find out!

In this test: the Vivitar Series 1's made respectively by Kino, Tokina, Komine; the Tamron SP 70-210mm adaptall 19AH. In addition I have two other lenses of interest: the other Tamron Adaptall SP 70-210mm the 52A, and the Kiron 70-210mm f4 "zoomlock". The 52A gets high praise on adaptall-2.com, but less than enthusiastic reviews eg on pentax forums. The "zoomlock" tends to get overlooked in favour of the VS1's. So that makes a 6 lens test.

I am posting results here:

http://www.groupoids.org.uk/photography/TamronVSvivitar/70-210mm.html

3 test pics up so far. Clicking on a test pic thumbnail will pull up an image comparison page (clever javascript courtesy of lenshunters.com thanks Martin). If you want you can right click on the images and then cntrl-click "view background image" to pull up the relevant image in a browser window (or to go on to view in eg Faststone).

Now I'd appreciate good eyes and screens to help assess the resulting images.

Lloydy · Expire: 2022-01-01

70-210 is a hotly contested section of the lens market, and there are some excellent lenses out there. I have one or two not in your test that I rate quite highly. I'm settling down for an interesting read. Wink

luisalegria · Expire: 2018-01-18

"Although I was concentrating focus on the eye and head, in practice this was the part of the gull that moved the most as it eyeballed me, hopped around a bit and scoped for stray chips. "

This is doing it the hard way. The stray chips are useful; best i have found is a bit of fried chicken breast. They will stay, and come back for that.

marcusBMG · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 1305 Location: Conwy N Wales

Aha so now you reveal your secrets Luis!

anktonio · Expire: 2017-02-22

Thanks for your great comparative and work!
Based on the photos of the castle, I think we have a loser, Tamron SP 70-210mm Adaptall-2 f/3.5-4 (52A)... It may be a misadjusted copy?

Happy shots!

marcusBMG · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 1305 Location: Conwy N Wales

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9097 Location: Houston, Texas

Yes, I can't wait to see the castle turret at 210mm.

This is a very interesting comparison. I have one of the lenses being tested here -- the Tamron 19AH. And I have another that may or may not be close in performance to another -- the 70-210mm Kiron. I have an 80-200mm f/4 Kiron with the zoom lock feature. A bit of light testing I did with it didn't reveal the same level of detail that the 70-210mm has, though.

I went through the comparisons with the castle and the seagull. At 70mm, to my eye, the Tamron 19AH was the clear winner. It had better contrast and sharpness than all the others wide open, and at f/8 still managed to out-do most. With a few, the images were essentially the same, but since it showed an edge wide open, I continued to give the nod to the Tamron.

With the seagull at 170-190mm, though, things changed. I wonder how much the movement of the bird had to do with the results, though. A stationary target would have been much better. But based on what I saw, I had to give the nod to the Kiron 70-210/4 both wide open and at f/8 (the only two f/stops I tested consistently with all lenses). Better sharpness and a more neutral color rendition as well. Now, I think it is only fair to mention that, it being a half stop slower (except the latest Vivitar, of course), this gives it some advantage, especially wide open, but it was still showing a noticeable advantage at f/8. So . . .

I'll be interested in checking out the 210mm photos.

Excalibur · Expire: 2014-04-21

Well IMO for sharpness\detail the 19AH comes first and the Kiron zoom lock a very close 2nd...but on film wasn't impressed by the Vivitar series 1 Tokina or the Kiron zoomlock, must be copy variation Sad

.
But I do have an excellent copy of the Kiron 80-200mm f4 (non zoomlock) and is much smaller and one of my favourites, but h'mm average at macro
The Tamrons 46a and 103a are quite good (but don't know how good, I need to do some testing like you) but surprise to me was the consumer Canon FDn 70-210 (in a box somewhere to get exact type) was ordinary.

luisalegria · Expire: 2018-01-18

Note: At seagull-distances it is very, very difficult to get comparable eyeball pictures correctly focused with a 70-210 zoom wide open or even stopped down to @5.6, and at f/8 they will all do the same anyway, even at 210mm. You will get a perfect pixel peeping eyeball with darn near anything at f/8.

Take it from a guy who has shot seagull eyeballs with darn near everything.

210mm at 3.5 you have @3millimeters of DOF at five feet. At 5.6 its more like 10mm. On a moving bird (preening, looking for the next bit of chicken) this isnt easy. At f/8 its more like 20mm and dead easy by comparison, but then all lenses are alike.

What really separates the men from the boys is infinity shots at 210mm.

Also, hot dogs will do very well also. Around here it is a normal childhood trauma for a kid enjoying a hotdog to get mugged by an airborne thief. My daughter had the distinction of having her cookie stolen by a peacock, thats a more stylish sort of trauma I guess.

fwcetus · Joined: 12 Jun 2015 Posts: 303 Location: New England

Interesting results so far -- very good (but hard) work.

As an owner of all half-dozen of the VS1 70-210 versions (as well as Tokina's own version of the VS1 70-210/3.5 V2), I look forward to continued testing...

Cool

marcusBMG · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 1305 Location: Conwy N Wales

Castle turret is up. Note good performance of the 52A...

I was about 5m from the gulls Luis. DoF of about 9cm at f4 (using Cambridge in Colour DoF calculator, 1.5x sensor) - sufficient to allow for small movements by the gull.

The main images I am now looking to get done are close focus results. I have a couple more sets of flower pics but not sure they are really adding much more information.
If any of you have a good idea for a test pic let me know here.

VLR · Joined: 05 Mar 2015 Posts: 86

Interesting real world comparison. I'm puzzled by the castle top results of the Vivitar S1 lenses: The Kiron is clearly the best of the bunch, followed by the Komine and the Tokina falls behind. In my short range tests, the exact opposite turned up @210 mm: The Kiron was by far inferior, the Tokina acceptable and the Komine was ahead by a comfortable margin.

I'm wondering, if this is just due to the difference in focal distance, or if it is a problem with my Kiron and your Tokina/Komine lenses. You mention that both, the Tokina and the Komine were disassembled and the Tokina had fungus. My copies are - as far as I can see - in pristine condition and were never touched.

marcusBMG · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 1305 Location: Conwy N Wales

Well as far as the condition of the lenses goes, I can say that I did not notice any discrepancy in the performance of the komine VS1 pre and post iris cleaning so I am happy that has not affected IQ; I did wonder if my maladjustment of the infinity focus on the tokina VS1 might have affected something but since it's just the fine tuning of the distance of the focus group that has been affected I assumed not, though its always possible that eg the spacing of the front elements didn't come back exactly resulting in some effect on IQ - best plan would be to try another example of this lens; the kiron VS1 has always shown good performance at 210mm for me so those results are consistent for this example of this lens and my experience of slight hazes or spots is that they do not noticeably affect performance.
As far as relating your results to these results well yes, focus distance can indeed have a big effect, that was one of the testing criteria. The other things to be said are that sample variation can be very significant especially for lenses of this complexity from this era; that there could certainly be some accidental operator error re focus, stability/vibration. You could argue that to be more scientific I should have taken a number of shots eg 10 with each lens at each aperture, checked the results for consistency and selected the best one, however for purely practical reasons I decided that I could get a representative result simply by taking care and using the good focus aids on the camera.
In the end these results are merely a reflection of these 6 particular examples of these lenses.

I did however do a second lot of turret shots using my Lumix G1 (M4/3). The results were similar but if anything the komine VS1 was showing slightly better than the kiron VS1 wide open. One thing that I do notice is the distinct deterioration in the IQ of the Kiron VS1 towards the top of the turret at f3.5. The focus point was on the front of the tower where the lightning conductor is. And I also felt that there might be slight front focusing with the 19AH (which is why I did the second batch) however the results with the G1 were the same, leaving me wondering if I should scrutinise the focusing of the 19AH a bit more (NB no front/back focussing problems like a dslr with an evf on mirrorless).

invisible · Joined: 06 Jun 2013 Posts: 343

First off, thanks much for doing this!

The left and right images don't align properly for me, so I can't really see the magnified images side by side (I hope this makes sense). I see that the write-up with the results is still outstanding – what's your verdict?

marcusBMG · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 1305 Location: Conwy N Wales

Thanks for your appreciation Invisible, I suggest that to really compare the images you right click on them ("view background image") to open them in their own browser window. I agree the images don't align exactly - depends a bit on the size of your screen, with larger screens the crops are big enough to include good overlap. With the gull it was impossible to line up the head identically anyway because it was moving around. The lilies align pretty well, as does the castle. I could try to do some judicious cropping of the turret shots.

VLR · Joined: 05 Mar 2015 Posts: 86

miran · Joined: 01 Aug 2012 Posts: 1364 Location: Slovenia

Of these 6 lenses I only have the Kiron made VS1 and I can confirm the results of the test with my copy. I too get best performance at closer focus distances (similar across most of the range) and worst at 210 with far to infinity focus.

marcusBMG · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 1305 Location: Conwy N Wales

I have now cropped the turret pics so they align - more or less.

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9097 Location: Houston, Texas

Well, this last test was interesting, but I also found that the results were very similar to what I saw at 170-190mm.

At 210mm, wide open, the Kiron is clearly the sharpest. But it does exhibit noticeable purple fringing that the other lenses don't show. The old Tamron 52A is just a little less sharp and the Tamron 19AH and Vivitar S1 2.8-4 are a toss-up for third place to my eyes. The Tokina made and Kiron made VS1s fare much poorer.

I observed them next at both f/8 and f/11 and honestly saw little difference between the two f-stops. Here, things tightened up considerably. There is essentially no difference in sharpness between the Kiron, Tamron 52A, and the later two VS1s. The Tamron 19AH is just a bit less sharp and the first version VS1 just a bit less sharp than the 19AH.

So, given overall performance then, I must give the nod to the Kiron. My 19AH does a decent job, but comes in 3rd overall, just behind the 52A in sharpness wide open and just barely behind the 52A at f/8 and f/11. It's interesting as well to note that the Modern Photography tests at adaptall-2.com show that the 19AH is a slightly better performer than the 52A. So this points to some sample variation as well.

I've always preferred the Tamron SP 60-300 over the 70-210s. I'd be curious to see how the 60-300, which was contemporary to the 19AH, measures up to the above lenses. At adaptall-2.com, looking at the Modern Photography resolution and contrast tests, the 60-300 at 300mm out-performs both the 19AH and 52A at 210mm.

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

I did like best Tamron I did test them many yrs ago, now probably I like zero of them at this time I shoot only with prime lenses.

marcusBMG · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 1305 Location: Conwy N Wales

I have cropped the castle images so that they pretty much line up. I have also now added some extra lenses to some of the test images:

1. Tamron SP 35-210mm 26A; Sigma DC 18-125mm to the castle images set. The sigma to have a comparison with a modern designed for digital lens.
2. Meyer optik gorlitz orestegor 200mm, takumar 200mm f3.5, tamron 35-210mm 26A to the turret set.

I also tried second copies of both the 52a and the 19AH. I didn't think the 19AH images were significantly different, but I thought the 52A was significantly better on teh castle images. You can see them as 52A #2.

I am prepping a set of macro close focus images.

Oldhand · Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2016 11:56 pm Post subject:

Excellent work Marcus.
Many thanks for your patience and perseverance
OH

fwcetus · Joined: 12 Jun 2015 Posts: 303 Location: New England

devinw · Joined: 19 Aug 2016 Posts: 207 Location: Portland, OR

No Rokkor/Minolta though?

marcusBMG · Joined: 07 Dec 2012 Posts: 1305 Location: Conwy N Wales

I have uploaded some red lily pics, with a look at bokeh and OOF rendering. K5, 120mm. Still working on the macro results.

What about rokkor/minolta devinw??