Tamron Adaptall 2 24-48mm Model 13A wide zoom

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Ah, the good old wide boy of the Tamron Adaptall lenses, the 24-48mm. ThIs bad boy was the widest zoom lens in the Adaptall lineup and one of the widest of all the Adaptalls, only beat out by the 17mm primes (51B/151B). It's not the widest zoom lens ever, it's not the fastest wide angle lens ever, but it does have the typical charm found in all the old Adaptall lenses.

Build quality and feel

Not a lot to say here that I haven’t covered in reviewing the other Adaptall lenses in my collection. It’s fairly heavy, well-constructed, beautifully-designed, and smooth-operating lens just like the rest of the Adaptalls. The only real difference here to me is the plastic aperture ring, which is plastic and feels really flimsy even compared to the other Adaptall plastic aperture control rings.

The heft of the lens is somewhat of a contradiction with the compact packaging. It's nice and small for a zoom lens. Zoom and focusing scales are clearly engraved and colorfully painted, and it's just a pleasure to look at these lenses.

Image quality

This old fella produces good, sharp images with adequate resolution. The aperture is pretty slow at 3.5-3.8, and stopped down a bit, the acuity of the lens is quite good. Close focus of the lens is around 2 feet so it's not great for detail close up work, but that’s not particularly what I like using it for.

The focus action is nice and smooth. The zooming is as well, but the zooming on both this lens and the 35-80mm zoom extend the nose of the lens at the widest setting and retract when zoomed in nearly to max. It's weird, but it's okay. That’s kind of the mantra with this line of lenses.

Sharpness and acuity are great, like other Adaptall lenses. The way that this lens sharpens up as well is quite nice. Sharpness and acuity are uniform across the image plane from wide open to stopped down, and as you stop down the sharpness increases across the image plane. Corners are pretty uniformly sharp, and as you stop down it goes from mildly soft at f3.5 to very sharp at f5.6 or f8. Diffraction softens everything up in my testing on a APS-C Fujifilm X-T1 at f11 and beyond, so about half of the aperture adjustment is functionally useless to me, but such is the case with a vintage lens designed for film with a max aperture of f32.

Color reproduction is good, if not a bit muted. Contrast is about average. The lens does suffer from massive lens flaring when shooting at direct light, and even with the BBAR coatings of the Tamron SP lenses it washes out really fast. This lens originally came with a proprietary lens hood which my copy sadly didn’t come with. I do fully intend to dive into fitting a hood on this lens since the flaring is problematic, as you don’t get the interesting flares and rainbows that can make for fun artistic additions to a photo but rather just blue and purple washes across the frame that kill the contrast.

The overall image quality is good. The sharpness and acuity is average to above average. The optical design seems to favor the wider end, which is okay by me since my purpose in grabbing this lens was to use the wide end and not so much the standard view end. Image quality may not be quite up to the standards of the 35-80mm which is a lot more like a bunch of primes in one zoom lens, but the overall quality justifies its price and place in my camera bag.

Check out some of my quick test shots with the lens

The Good

• Adaptall SP build and image quality
• It looks rad
• Hits a good general use wide angle zoom range
• Compact size

The Bad

• Moderately heavy
• Fairly expensive for a vintage, all-manual zoom
• Fairly slow at f3.5
• Proprietary cap/lens hood
• No filter threading (was included in the original lens hood)
• Bad flaring without a hood

Conclusion

This is a nice wide-angle zoom. It's not the widest of wide-angle zooms, it’s not the fastest, it’s not the biggest zoom range, and it does suffer from pretty catastrophic flaring when shooting at bright light sources. But it is a fun lens with good image quality, a fantastic build quality, and a lovely design aesthetic overall. If you find one for a good price (or at all… they’re kind of rare), give it a shot. You might have just as much fun with the lens as I do.

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