Thanks Tim . I ll keep a eye on these. The VC is most likely going to be off in good light , I noticed some weird stuff as you mentioned. I'm not a big fan of image stabilization myself anyway. I figured nice to have for video and when in very low light. My use for this lens is travel and PR work so it should be okay. My other kit lenses( zeiss) are more for the high end stuff.
One reason I try to avoid zooms is there is always some focal length in them that are just okay and they distort heavily too sometimes. I'm a prime guy in almost every system but a mid range zoom can be handy. For PR crap they are great but I'm old school too and I still want optical finders too. Just hard to change my spots. LOL
Putting aside the issue of vibration control in the Tammy 24-70 (thats one of the reasons I mentioned it previously), Tamron, more so than some others biases performances of their mid-range zooms towards the long end. They've done this for years after an initial series of early manual focus zooms were praised for great wide angle performance wide open, but blasted for horrific results at the telephoto end. They also figure most causal users find it easier to stop down and get sharp hand held results at the wide end then doing the same at the long end. In the "old days"...I even got Tamron to bias a zoom differently for better performance in the range I used it most. This actually can be done!
Guy, although you already were probably expecting it, I was going to warn you of the strong possibility of soft corners/edges at 24mm....something I've experienced to a lesser degree with their shorter more simplified 28-75 f2.8 zoom and why I stuck with that one for the time being as opposed to going over to the 24-70.
As you and Tim noted, optically, the 24-70 does extremely well in the central part of the frame throughout its range and across most of the frame when racked out to 70mm.
If ever you should desire a relatively inexpensive, moderately compact but excellent performing telezoom for travel, the Tammy 70-300 VC lens is it...over it's Nikon counterpart, by a significant margin. No, it's not a Nikon 70-200 f2.8 VRII but Imagine it's performance at 70mm surpasses that of the 24-70 you have (at the 70mm end) and doesn't fall off much untill you aproach 260mm...and even at 300mm stopped down a stop, the gap in performance closes quicky. All predicated though on finding a good sample.
Dave (D&A)