Photography Gear News

When it comes to fast tele zooms, there is only a very limited selection of dedicated DX lenses. One of these rare species is the Tokina AT-X 50-135mm f/2.8... or to be precise, it was, since it is discontinued for a while already.
The AT-X 50-135mm is the result of a cooperation between Tokina and Pentax, which leads to the interesting situation that a Pentax design is also available to users of competing systems. However, the Pentax and Tokina lenses are not completely identical, at least mechanically.

In this review we will have a look at how the lens performs on our current DX test camera, the Nikon D7000.

Even several years ago lenses with 10-15x zoom multiple were those products I wouldn’t recommend to anybody. Often shoddily made devices (with the exception of the Canon L-series lens), they provided images of average or weak quality. The situation has changed significantly lately, though, and two factors contributed to that change. Firstly a lot of Far East factories came into existence so the price of glass and elements of special kind (low-dispersion, aspherical) decreased considerably and they could be used even in cheaper lenses. Secondly, the increase of the computing power of contemporary processors has made the design of complex optical constructions with a wide range of focal lengths much easier.

Small wonder in last 2-4 years we saw several quite well-made 18-200 mm constructions launched on the market. The producers didn’t stop at that – in fact they moved one or even two steps ahead. The record belongs here to the Tamron 18-270 mm with the 15x zoom multiple, which fared quite well in our tests. Sigma didn’t go so far and it offers the 18-200 mm OS lens, tested by us long time ago, and the 18-250 mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM model, launched in January 2009, which avoided our test procedures for quite a long time. Finally it found its way to our editorial office and we checked its performance in practice