Tamron 25-200mm: Your travel zoom just became a macro lens…

Half-macro all the way out to 70mm - delivered over a USB cable!

Tamron 25-200mm F2.8 - 5.6 Di III VXD G2: Firmware 2.00 at 50mm

Tamron 25-200mm F2.8 - 5.6 Di III VXD G2: Firmware 3.00 at 50mm

Same lens, same position, no crop. Tamron 25-200mm.

Ten minutes. That's all it takes.

Nothing was replaced. Nothing was sent anywhere. Nothing about the lens is physically different.

You just need to plug it into your computer, and it comes back able to do something it couldn't do before.

The 25-200 could already shoot half-macro - but only at 25mm, right at the wide end.

Firmware 3.00 stretches that all the way out to 70mm. Between 35 and 50 it goes to 1:1.7, up from 1:3.1.

Same lens. No crop. Nobody touched the glass.

Bug, to dinosaur.

Firmware updates usually fix autofocus bugs that only ever affected fourteen people in the whole world. They don't add specifications.

This one did!

One thing the press release won't tell you: at 1:1.7 you're close enough that the biggest lighting problem in the frame is you. Light it from the side, or you'll spend the afternoon photographing your own shadow.

Sony E only, and it's FREE. USB-C straight into the mount, open TAMRON Lens Utility, hit update.

And while you're in there — Lens Utility does a lot more than firmware. Focus presets, remapping the focus ring, custom switch behaviour, astro lock, focus timelapse and a ton of other stuff. I made a full video about it, which is here: https://www.mikestehlik.com/post/tamron-link-tl01-lens-utility-5-bluetooth-ios

Until next time,

Mike