Tamron teases four new mirrorless lenses, likely not for RF

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Tamron USA has begun teasing four new mirrorless lenses on their =68.ARDA5h3IgqrAjlk-fY6cYtu5U1QEcb87X3MsEp1If5yFbYBEPLvN4lYMwv4O2S_cQU-RwbxL8CRQIL5YCpptVR1qRaojc0Rdlrr096mSPSVjTt_8UONascWruXV3Pl8YYT1Jae1YnF9Dxsp9N4De62L4ZjRHELBGSeOaYThiHBVyACcl4-NA6sQysV-jFH-v6MoOBciiBo7ksst5o6nLJKWQRnXmhGvp8TMFv95Ykr92IYTEHjCdPMwEqYU9L2eb8ykdIFLZGmyr3sGC8Pxh9Wl5JKbIXYN2SYUyvdrt5IIgCf3-xGaF5t88qJSkDzpuAMYWisdD1OYipaWZPk9ym4PVss1DDw&__tn__=-R]Facebook page.
There’s no mention of what the four lenses are as of yet, or what mount(s) these lenses will be available for. I think it’s still a bit early to see third party autofocus lenses for Canon’s RF mount from Tamron or SIGMA, but surprises do happen.
Tamron currently has 2 mirrorless lenses for Sony’s  FE mount, so it’s likely these will be for Sony as well. Judging by the teaser, it looks like a telephoto zoom lens and three prime lenses are coming.

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I suspect that the RF lens protocol for Canon and Nikon is well protected by patents and not easy to work around. I wonder what will eventually happen. Japanese law and customs vary a lot from European and US law. We may very well see the first fully compatible RF lenses coming from China.

I do not remember seeing patents about RF protocol. I have not searched for them, though, but since there seem to be a few people covering Canon patents (at least you, Canon News and Northlight), they should have been found already. Have you or others seen such? The downside of patents is that patents are public. Maybe Canon has encrypted the protocol or at least made it hard to reverse engineer?

Also, as there are new features still to come to the R system (e.g. Dual IS) that may require additional features in the protocol, it may be risky to bring RF products to the marketplace just yet.
 
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Depending on the implementation it might be possible for third party lenses to present themselves as EF lenses with the adapter attached. If the adapter only passes signal through to the camera, the RF cameras should be able to understand EF and that's something the third parties have mostly figured out.

Right. Has it been confirmed that there is no active protocol translation happening in the adapter, though? I have read strong opinions with some kind of evidence that EF signals are just passed through, but I am not convinced. And even if the signals were just passed through, there may be a handshake sequence between the EF-RF adapter and the body when an adapted EF lens is attached, which would have to be hacked anyway to be able to emulate it.
 
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Right. Has it been confirmed that there is no active protocol translation happening in the adapter, though? I have read strong opinions with some kind of evidence that EF signals are just passed through, but I am not convinced. And even if the signals were just passed through, there may be a handshake sequence between the EF-RF adapter and the body when an adapted EF lens is attached, which would have to be hacked anyway to be able to emulate it.
And answering my own stupid question right away. As there already is a third party EF-RF adapter from Commlite, obviously there is nothing special happening in the adapter and also emulating an adapted EF lens should be fairly straight-forward.
 
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