I have been using this lens for a few weeks now and I am quite impressed with the sharpness through the entire image. One thing to noe is that you should check that you have the correct firmware installed. I needed to do this but the process was well explained on the Tamron website. The fix was to fix a bug in the autofocus. The updated firmware seems to have fixed this issue. The manual focus works great. For the price this is a fine travel lens.