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Lens review

Tamron 90 mm f/2.8 Di III Macro VXD

16 January 2025
Maciej Latałło

10. Autofocus and focus breathing

Autofocus

The Tamron 90 mm f/2.8 Di III Macro VXD is equipped with the linear VXD (Voice-coil eXtreme-torque Drive) motor that is supposed to offer you a quick, precise and noiseless performance. Joined with the Nikon Z7 it is very silent, that's true; when it comes to the speed, running through the whole distance range and confirming the focus takes about one second. It is perhaps not a result able to bowl you over but you have to remember you deal here with a macro lens, with a huge distance range to cover. What's more, the Tamron seems to perform faster than the Sony lens joined with the Sony body.

Limiting the focus to a range from 0.7 of a meter to infinity the speed of working improves to an already excellent level of 0.3-0.4 of a second.

The accuracy of the focusing mechanism also made us quite impressed. It performed in a very stable way, no matter whether we took photos in the studio or outside.


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We didn't notice any problems with any front or back focus tendencies.

Nikon Z7, 90 mm, f/2.8
Tamron 90 mm f/2.8 Di III Macro VXD - Autofocus and focus breathing

Focus breathing

Focus breathing tests show refraiming images as you oversharp them. We conduct the test by manually passing from the minimum focusing distance to infinity with the aperture stopped down; then we check how the field of view of the lens changed as a result.

A change of the frame ranging from 0 to 5% we consider to be low. Between 5 and 10% we can speak about a medium level. Usually these are also maximum values compensation algorithms, present in some bodies, can effectively deal with. A high level constitute results between 10 and 15%, more than 15% means a very high level.

The test video of the tested Tamron lens is presented below:

In case of the tested lens the assessment of an effective focal length change after passing to the minimum focusing distance is simply not possible. With this setting the testing chart is simply defocused so much that it looks like a single-coloured patch. Still, already in the middle of the distance scale range, where focus breathing can still be assessed, the result of the Tamron 90 mm f/2.8 Di III Macro VXD exceeded 20%. It seems we can speak about a very high level of this aberration – it seems the effectively tested lens at the maximum mapping scale doesn't have anything in common with either the 90 mm focal length or the f/2.8 aperture.