
... Lens delivers for its price tag.
Yes its true, it will not capture front cover National Geographic photos nor pocket camera mediocre results.
The main advantage is the additional zoom range, making good for portraits and has some wide angle for those spontaneous group photos.
The lens tends to get lost in details at its widest range of 28mm when is very sunny and focusing to infinity, the Nikon D60 meter does not adjusts well on these light conditions. I leave the wide angle nature photos to the 18-55 giving better results.
I did some testing at a birthday Playground party (sunny, cloudy day), +1 in sharpness, WB to partly cloudy set at zero. I played every now and then with Under Over exposure; +0.3,.7 when cloudy and -.3-.7 when very sunny. This lens likes to give very saturated colors so try to leave it on Normal, not vivid colors or will be super rich reds, greens.
Portraits: I find this lens does well in this category, if the light is right good details, tones can be achieved with blurry backgrounds at 80mm, remember to use the lens hood. The lens delivers well on portraits, I love it for such a cheap lens, colors come out very good. I retouch many photos on Elements 6 and Camera Raw giving it darker values to shadows and highlights to white areas. Good details are revealed by lowering saturation and contrast with no weird out of focus backgrounds.
It may be me, but I have experienced adjusting the Image and quality to Medium instead of Fine gives better results, I guess less is more in this case.
Close ups with the built in iTTL flash are extremely good, details are excellent, I found the lens to deliver easy and without any much processing with flash and set on Auto, piece of cake.
Overall: very good lens, feels sturdy. I have heard bad comments about plastic lens mount, but the Nikon 18-55 is also plastic. I wish the focusing ring was smoother and zoom be linear instead of rotational, makes it hard to manual focus on moving objects like sports etc. I recommend this lens
This lens gives a very pro look to your camera especially with the lens hood on. Do not worry, this lens DOES NOT look cheap or in other words, it does not look like a 70 dollar lens. I replaced the Tamron lens cap for a Nikon one :-)... ...
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Tamron AF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 Aspherical Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras