Reviewed By: Mark Taylor on 08/10/2007,     Customer Rating: 

The Tokina 10-17mm lens is relatively small and lightweight for it’s capabilities and sports. The 10-17mm is a conventionally styled lens, it has two rings separated by a distance window, marked in both metres and feet.

The first of the two rings operates the zoom mechanism in the 10-17mm and is marked at 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 17mm and is well torqued, giving a feeling of solidity to the zoom mechanism.
The front ring operates the focus mechanism of the 10-17mm and is torqued much more lightly when in Manual Focus mode but is stiff and not over-rideable in Auto Focus mode. The Auto Focus mechanism rotates the ring and does so with a quiet quick.

The front of the 10-17mm lens has a fixed lens hood with no filter thread and the lens cap is a nice fit over the wings of the hood.

The zoom action of the 10-17mm is at it’s shortest physical length at the 12mm mark but extends the front of the lens only marginally as you zoom to the two extremes of the focal length os 10mm and 17mm. There is, however, no method of using filters and with the 180° field of view at the widest, no point in trying to attach any filter but you can attach the filter at the back element of the 10-17mm lens.

Optical quality in the 10-17mm lens is the best quality among all Tokina lenses. Don’t mix 10-17mm lens up with some of the other 10mm offerings on the market, the 10-17mm is a fisheye Zoom lens and therefore uncorrected for perspective. Although the image fills the frame (and is not what is known as a circular fisheye), the distortion especially at the edges of the frame, is very noticeable. The 10-17mm lens is designed only for Digitla cameras, you can use it with film SLR camera but it will be a complete circular image. the 10-17mm zoom lens solved the problem of having two separate lenses for different purposes, so it will be only one lens you will have to be carrying all the time for. the image quality with 10-17mm lens is realy nice.