This strikes me as a good general purpose lens, and good for a little light duty close-up work.

It is keenly priced (c. AUD 350).

Minimum focus is 15cm (1:2 mag), which makes it OK to use smaller domes (eg. 140) to calm the aberrations.

Land reviews praise its sharpness, and criticise its AF as slow (a bit faster in AFC cf AFS).

There is no other close-focusing AF option around 35mm focal length for Sony shooters, but Canon makes an R series 35mm macro.

So, is there any Sony shooter out there using it underwater, and if so how do you find the AF (especially in low light); and are you using a dome?

Thanks in anticipation...

Hey @dentrock! I had this lens for a little bit back in 2022. Looking back at my library it seems I took it on two different dives. At the time I was shooting my a6400 in a Salted Line housing, behind a 6" acrylic dome. You can see that it has range/versatility, good for both fish portraits and smaller things.

My take is as you said, a good, relatively inexpensive general purpose lens. I was never one to pixel peep corners, so I was satisfied with it behind the 6" dome. I don't recall it struggling with AF at all underwater, and the conditions I dive in are certainly not clear blue water (where I dive in the Gulf of Mexico, we get a lot of particulate hanging about, and a good day is 33ft/10m viz).

I've attached some samples below. The Leopard Toadfish is probably the best of all the photos I took with this lens. You'll have to ignore the poor focus on the mouth/eyes, as I apparently shot this at f/3.5 and spot focused toward the back of its head, so my DoF is off. The rest I chose because they aren't terrible and show a bit of the range of the lens.

On aps-c Sony cameras I would choose the 30mm macro lens over this Tamron so-called macro (rather good close up)

Edited June 19Jun 19 by Nikolausz

Thats pretty sharp, @Craine .

Thanks for sharing.

The need for a dome steers away - I won't use it enough to justify bringing it on international trips. Cost and space elements.

Thanks @Craine for taking the time to post the evaluation and samples. As I suspected, the AF is probably good enough; in line with, or slightly faster than, the Sony 50 macro which I have been using a lot (with AFC) with a 140 "curved port".

I forgot to mention its 35mm with FF I'm interested in. For APS-C, in addition to the 30 macro, there is the excellent Sony / Zeiss 24 (35 equiv) which focuses very close and works great behind a mini dome, such as the #36125. Too expensive new, but there are good used examples on Japanese ebay sites.