Tamron 35-70mm f3.5 (17A)

One of the sharpest Tamron Zooms I own.

Page Last Edited : Sunday, 11th of May 2025.
© Dave Rowlands. All Rights Reserved.

The Tamron 35-70mm f3.5 Zoom, first released in 1982, is a great all round walkabout lens when attached to one of my Olympus M43 cameras. It gives a field of view of a 70-140mm lens (In 35mm Film Speak) but when adding my FotoDiox focal reducer it becomes a 25.2-50.4mm f2.52 lens with some great photographic opportunities.

Amazingly enough I won this on eBay in an auction, it's something I don't do very often and I was surprised I won as my original bid was for less than £10.00 which didn't include the postage at £3.45. According to Adaptall-2 I have the first version of this lens due to the fine diamond pattern on the focusing control.

The lens itself is in great condition, it can take a while to get used to the focusing and zoom settings.

The lens is at it shortest physical length when set at 70mm which is something I wasn't used to.

The ltwo knurled knobs are also strange to use, they control the zoom settings and if set to 35mm the focusing becomes awkward to say the least.

It took me a while to get used to it but the resulting images certainly made up for the original frustration I felt.

After receiving the lens I let it get to room temperature as I always do, for about 30 to 60 minutes depending on the temperature outside, I then give it a quick clean and stuck it onto my E-M5 II camera and took a few test shots. As usual the weather was awful with wind and rain along with poor light. Below are the results of this quick non technical look at how this lens actually performs, I took full 100% crops from various sections of the image:

Full image of the view from my front door, taken at 1/125 sec, f6.3, ISO 200 in Aperture Priority mode.

A 100% crop of the previous image, the church lightning rod at the top of the steeple is practically invisible when using a low quality lens and it's my favorite testing point. It is soon going to become hidden by the trees growing in front of the view.

100% Crop of the bottom left of original image.

100% Crop of the bottom right of original image.

100% Crop of the bottom center of original image.

100% Crop of center left of the original image, you can even see how bad the weather was.

100% Crop of center right of the original image.

100% Crop of center top left of the original image.

100% Crop of Top Left of the original image.

100% Crop of Top Right of the original image.

As can be seen from the few images above the lens is a really good performer. The weather was poor so once things improve I think I will be taking this little lens out for further testing. The handling of the lens is very different from a lot of the other manual lenses I own and I think it is going to take a while to get used to the way the lens operates, for instance it has a "Push\Pull" zoom action that also depends on it's focusing position. It took me a while to get used to it and from what I have seen by users you shouldn't rely too much on the automation of going into macro mode as it can wear out the helicoids and gearing system which becomes hard to use. The lens when focused at infinity allows the whole zoom range to be used but once you focus on something close the zoom range changes, like I said it takes a while to get used to it. Other than that though it's a really great walkabout lens even on the M43 systems.

As the weather is still pretty bad out there I thought I'd have a look at some other test shots I had taken, here are a couple I took with the E-M5 using the Focal Reducer and 100% crops to go with them. The lens was at 70mm set to f5.6 which using the Focal Reducer it would be like having a 50mm f4.0 lens attached and of course on the M43 system it would give a FOV a 100mm lens. I set the IBIS focal length to 45mm and it seemed OK even at lower zoom ranges.

Taken out of the side window at 1/500th second, f5.6 at ISO 200.As you can see the weather was pretty bad.

A 100% crop of the image showing writing on the bus stop sign which to me for a lens that's over 40 years old and a camera that came out in 2012 is outstanding.

Taken from my front door of the bus stop just across the road from the house at 1/320th second, f5.6 at ISO 200.

A 100% crop of the image showing the mould on the bus stop sign and the rust is quite visible on the metal. It's amazing the detail resolved especially as it's also attached to a Focal Reducer.

Here are some more shots taken without the Focal Reducer on my E-M5 II.

It was a misty day and this was taken at around 11:20 AM on the 3rd of April 2024. 1/160th second at f5.6 ISO 200.

Another quick shot from my front door, the lens was set at 35mm and I had to crop the bottom half of it because of the cars and distractions. Still, it looks pretty good for a nearly 50% crop.

This was taken though the living room window, I didn't like it at first because it looked totally un-sharp and then I realised it was because of the trees and leaves. Taken at 1/125th second at f5.6 with ISO at 250. I ended up cropping it as shown below.

A crop of the above photograph as it still didn't look right to me. The weather here has a lot to answer for. I should probably use Chasys Draw IES to remove the two high voltage insulators from the image (Center left) as it has one of the best "Content Aware" tools I have ever used, and not only that it's FREE and updated on a regular basis. Give it a try, you won't regret it.

I finally managed to get a sunny day shot from my front door. I'd already loaded my E-M1 II with the Focal Reducer and the Tamron 35-70mm f3.5 zoom and then all of a sudden the sun came out, blue skies with white clouds and I just picked up the camera an took a couple of quick shots from my front door step. Not the best I have done but look at the colours.

The view from my front door step when the sun actually comes out. Taken at 35mm focal length, 1/1600th second exposure at f5.6 and ISO of 200 with a picture mode of "Natural" which tends to mute colours.

I'll have to do some "Hi-Res" shots with these Tamron lenses I own just to see what the results would be like. I opened Olympus Workspace and applied the "Vivid" picture mode and saved the result as a JPeg, SuperFine 100% and the result is below.

The straight out of camera JPeg above, or SOOC as seems to be the acronym for un processed images. I use DX0 Optics Pro 11 when I have nothing better to do, I still use the DxO FilmPack 5, DxO OpticsPro 10, and DxO ViewPoint 2. I know they are older versions of today's offerings but the cameras I use are also old, the E-M5 II first came out in February 2015, and the E-M1 II just over a year later in October 2016.and the DX0 11 has a copyright date of 2004-2016 on it's about box. I still use the original Nik Collection with it updated to the last version before DX0 labs acquired it. Here is the same image edited in DX0 11:

I'd normally remove the telephone lines from the image but leaving them in actually shows how sharp the results are from this lens. There are probably M43 lenses that would out resolve this older chunk of metal and glass but I don't have that kind of money to spend on creating a pixel peepers dream, I don't look at pixels when viewing photographs. I really do like the Negative and Positive film simulations offered with the DX0 suite. I created a page to show the different simulations offered by Dx0 using their options available through Dx0 11 and Dx0 10, I never thought of upgrading as the package always served me well with the current setup I have. To see some of the simulations have a look at this DxO Film Simulations, the slide or positive film simulations are interesting.

I took some shots of the lens on my E-M1 II with the "FotoDioX Pro FD-M43 EXCELL + 1" attached which are shown below. and today I took some more photographs just to show how bad the weather can be around here, I even tried to get a couple of Panoramics,

Ordinarily on the M43 camera the lens would have a field of view (in 35mm full frame format) of a 70-140mm zoom lens.

With the addition of the Focal Reducer on the M43 camera the lens would have a field of view (in 35mm full frame format) of a 50.4-100.8mm zoom lens with an aperture of f2.52 because of the 0.72x magnification factor of the Focal Reducer.

The lens will definatley benefit from a lens hood which would prevent stray light hitting the rather large front element.

Even without a lens hood it seems pretty flare resistant, there is a large window to the top right of the camera shining light directly onto it.

And here are some shots taken with the above combination as well as a couple of panoramic stitchers using Microsoft ICE. I've been using ICE for so long I forget there are other programs much better and easier to use but it's the first program in my list of Panoramic creators.

The first panorama I just used two shots as the edge detection due to the poor lighting just couldn't manage to stitch the three shots together I took and due to the trees, mist, and rain I even had trouble stitching them manually.

Even with just two images stitched together you can achieve some interesting results. The individual images were taken at 1/640th Second, f4 with ISO at 200 using Aperture Priority. As can be seen the weather was normal for around here at this time of year.

I had better luck with the next set of shots even though I messed up on the last one.

The individual images were taken at 1/800th Second, f4 with ISO at 200 using Aperture Priority so the only difference was the shutter speed going from 1/640th a second to 1/800th of a second. As can be seen the individual images are very good with the "FotoDioX Pro FD-M43 EXCELL + 1" attached and not nearly as bad as reported in the so called forum reviews many years ago. The FotoDioX which was selling for less than 1/5th of the MetaBones ones it was compared to and with all the negative press about it FotoDioX cancelled all future research and development into their product.

To see one of the reviews from 2014 click "Here". Like I have said in other posts I don't have a problem with the one I have, a couple of pictures of the FotoDioX I have are below.

The Canon FD mount side of the focal reducer. You can see the blue tint on the lenses, this sometimes shows up on the photos taken depending on the lens and aperture.

The Micro Four Thirds mount side of the focal reducer. Again the blue tint is visible.

So, a search on the internet provided a few answers to the blue tint and this is the one that seems to be the most popular:

"The blue tint of a coated camera lens is largely due to the effect of interference. This phenomenon occurs when light waves overlap, causing them to add together or cancel out, resulting in different colors. In this case, thin film interference is going on where the coating on the lens causes a phase shift in the light waves reflecting off it and causes them to interfere with each other, resulting in a blue coloration."

The blueish haze shows up on some images depending on the lens aperture and how bright the light is. It's easy enough to remove but it just adds another step in the process of creating the final result.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse