Ultra-wide lenses can be a blessing and a curse. They can create amazing images in certain situations, but very poor ones if not used correctly. That’s obviously not the fault of the lens, but the wet stuff behind it. For instance, at focal lengths like 14mm or 16mm on a full-frame camera, you need to be right on top of a subject to fill the frame with it. You also have to work extra hard to balance the exaggerated rendering these lenses deliver, as they dramatically enlarge anything close and push distant elements away. Ultra-wide zooms themselves also have to work hard to retain sharpness and control distortion.

　　Launched in the middle of 2025, the Tamron 16-30mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 straddles ultra and modest wide-angle settings and it’s available for Sony E and Nikon Z mounts. I tested it on a Nikon Z8 body.

　　Tamron 16-30mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 review Features Unlike, for instance, a typical 14-24mm example, or Tamron’s recently announced Tamron 12-20mm model, the 16-30mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 has a range of focal lengths that are actually fairly forgiving. Sure, the wide end gives a very expansive 107° field of view, but through 24mm and 28mm to the long end you’ve got some wide-angle settings that aren’t prone to distort in the same way. At 30mm it actually feels quite documentarian.

　　The zoom is close to 2x, so somewhat more expansive than other ultra-wide zooms. Although it doesn’t, in itself, give masses of variety, it’s a lens that can take in an awful lot of subjects, aided by its constant f/2.8 maximum aperture. Landscapes, interiors, group shots, environmental portraits and even close-up sports all spring to mind, in regular or low-light conditions.

　　Switch to APS-C mode, and the range is extended to 45mm equivalent at the long end. Or at least, just as long as you’re not worried about losing some pixels, which really isn’t a problem with Nikon or Sony’s high-res models. I certainly found myself flicking into the Z8’s DX mode for landscape details or tighter views.

　　And with its ability to focus fairly close – 19cm at the wide end and 30cm at the long – you can also achieve reasonable close-up details, adding texture and variety to a landscape or documentary shoot.

　　The 16-30mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 has a construction of 16 elements in 12 groups, including an extra-low dispersion element to reduce chromatic aberrations, two low dispersion elements that help correct fringing and distortion at wide angles, and three glass molded aspherical elements which control spherical aberrations while reducing the lens’s size.

　　It also employs Tamron’s BBAR (Broad Band Anti-Reflection) G2 coating to reduce reflections and improve contrast and colour, and the nine-bladed aperture should result in softer bokeh as well as 18-pointed sunstars.

　　There’s also a Fluorine coating that repels water and oil for easier cleaning of the front element. And in front of the latter you can fit 67mm filters, which chimes with the lens’s travel-friendly size and weight. At 75x104mm and weighing well under 500g, it’s remarkably small and light. It boasts ‘Moisture Resistant’ construction, so can be used more freely in adverse conditions and comes with a reversible, petal-shaped lens hood.

　　It’s worth noting that the lens has no optical image stabilisation. However, this isn’t particularly rare in wide-angle zooms designed for mirrorless models due to the overwhelming number of cameras which now have sensor-based stabilisation.

　　Autofocus comes via Tamron’s VXD (Voice-coil eXtreme-torque Drive) system, an electromagnetic rather than mechanical drive, which should be quieter and quicker. There’s no AF/MF switch, but there is a customisable lens-function button. It has zoom and manual focus rings, but no aperture ring, and no control ring, though the focus ring can be used to control aperture via the Tamron Lens Utility.

　　Tamron 16-30mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 review Build and Handling The 16-30mm f/2.8 Di III VXD G2 is relatively travel-friendly in its dimensions, has a very simple design and is easy to use. The zoom ring sits closest to the body and has plenty of width, texture and grip, so it’s easy to use even in gloves. It turns from near to far in around 90º and combined with the fairly short zoom range, this makes it precise.

　　The lens doesnt extend in length when zooming, but its front element does move in and out within the housing, inevitably meaning it’s more exposed to ingress than a fixed model. But screwing on a filter solves this. The lens hood doesn’t have a window to help turn a polariser, but this wasn’t much of a problem for me as I was using a holder that accommodated one.

　　Also, like other recent Tamron models, the handy USB port used for wired and wireless control feels somewhat exposed. I didn’t have any trouble with it shooting in conditions like light rain, but I would still generally fit a rubber plug to anything like this, be it a phone, charger or otherwise. This might be because I’m a middle-aged man, however.

　　The lens’s constant f/2.8 maximum is very welcome in several ways. More light means faster focusing (of which more later) and it’s useful for shorter exposures in low light, such as on the street or framing night skies, though obviously less so than an f/1.8 or f/1.4 lens. Subject separation is modest at the wide end, but if you get close enough to foreground elements, they can be easily blurred to frame a subject.

　　Tamron 16-30mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 review Autofocus Speed of focus might not be top of the list for those using the lens on landscapes, architecture or interiors. But with its VXD motor, this lens’s performance is very impressive, opening up subjects like street, documentary and even close-up action work. It racked from close to infinity almost instantly regardless of where I was in the zoom, and is very quiet, making it suitable for weddings or similar, too. Inevitably it began to hunt a bit more in the gloom and on low-contrast subjects, but overall performance, including with subject tracking, was reassuring.

　　The behaviour of the manual focus ring can be changed by the aforementioned Lens Utility app, meaning you can set it from linear, non-linear, increase or decrease the throw, or limit it to a particular distance, which is useful for astro photography. Along with in-camera aids like focus peaking and previews, manual focus will therefore be as accurate as the user can make it.

　　Tamron 16-30mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 review Image quality At 16mm, my sample delivered very good sharpness in the centre at f/2.8 and was even better at f/4 all the way through to f/11. Without ever being smeary or distorted, the edges lagged slightly at f/2.8, improving through f/4 and f/5.6 at which point an excellent balance seemed to be reached. In the middle of the focal range, results at f/2.8 were again impressive showing plenty of contrast, and reached a peak around f/5.6, where the corners also caught up. At 30mm wide open the results seemed fractionally less sharp than the wider settings, but were still very good, and excellent from f/5.6 to f/8. Corners held up well wide-open with the best sharpness at f/5.6 to f/8.

　　The lens coped extremely well with flare, even when shooting directly into the sun, with contrast remaining high. Vignetting is present, mostly wide open at 16mm, but you need to turn off the in-camera profile to make it particularly noticeable. At f/4 to f/5.6 it appeared to be invisible. There is also some barrel distortion at 16mm, and again it’s easily corrected by the profile.

　　Bokeh was also nice and smooth and with the right focusing you can get well rounded balls of lights, which hold their shape well until the very edges of the frame.

　　Verdict On some level I think I’ve always preferred 16-35mm lenses to 14-24mm models, as they just seem to offer more variety, and the 16-30mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 is no exception. It’s a versatile tool which allows the user to shift into ultra-wide settings when required, but keep one foot in more realistic framing, too. Its image quality is very good, giving lots of detail in the landscapes I shot, and I wouldn’t hesitate to use it for event or documentary work either, thanks to the f/2.8 aperture and excellent speed and accuracy of the focus. It’s also a very portable lens, so something you can pair with a standard zoom or longer without feeling like you’re carrying half a camera shop around with you. And it all comes at a decent price. 

　　Tamron 16-30mm F/2.8 Di III VXD G2 Full Specifications Scroll to see more →

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