Tamron teases four new mirrorless lenses, likely not for RF

9 comments

1. 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.

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2. Bases look too wide for sony mount. Betcha tamron wanting to cash in before all the native and very pricy RF lenses come out.

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3. 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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4. 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.

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5. 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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6. 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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7. Sony has shares in Tamron, so I assume they "motivate" Tamron to prioritize FE mount.

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8. Sony has shares in Tamron, so I assume they "motivate" Tamron to prioritize FE mount.

   Isn't that legally a criminal fraud against other shareholders?

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9. I do not remember seeing patents about RF protocol.

   There was one about boosting communication speed based on the lens attached.
   
   Emulating an EF lens should be still fine, though.

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