Good eye! ;-)

You probably won't have to wait too long, assuming there aren't any anomalies with the lens. With that in mind, though, Bryan went through several Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 VCs before he was satisfied with the results.

My first retail-purchased copy of this lens did not have it. After spending 10 hours or so completing image quality testing of my first copy of the 24-70 VC lens (on the ISO 12233 resolution chart), it became clear that the lens was not working properly at the longer focal lengths. Image quality was simply unacceptable at 70mm. Tamron confirmed that the results were not as they expected (and they wanted the lens back for analysis).

The second copy (again, retail-purchased) of this lens performed better optically, but it was still not perfect. The right side of the image, the portion of the image circle shown in the site's image quality tool, was softer than the left. This lens also had some AF problems. Multiple times we experienced unresponsive AF from this lens mounted to a Canon 1Ds Mark III. And the lens was not properly AF-calibrated for this Canon factory-calibrated camera.


I suspected that a decentering issue was causing the right-side softness problem and thought that this issue could be easily corrected by Tamron service. Tamron quickly returned the repaired lens, but ... it performed worse than before I sent it in.


Tamron sent me a shipping label and promptly performed another attempt at the repair. They may actually have replaced the lens as it was returned with a new serial number. We spent over a full week testing this lens model for the ISO 12233 chart image quality test alone, but persistence has paid off ... I think we have an as-good-as-it-gets copy in our hands now.
But with that said, I think he'll have the standardized results up on the site in the not-so-distant future. And a full review is planned (also should not very far off).