snegron7 wrote:
Sadly, this purchase will most likely happen. As usual, we the consumers will end up getting the worst of the deal. Higher retail prices, less choices all while stockholders and corporations make a ton of money. I learned a long time ago that being a "loyal fan" of any company (Nikon, Canon, Sony, etc.) is a complete waste of time. These companies exist ONLY to make a profit. If they discovered that making toilet paper would make them more money, they would cease camera/lens manufacturing immediately and start making toilet paper instead.
So, enjoy what you have and don't count on your "favorite" camera or lens manufacturer to be there in the future for you. For all we know, Taco Bell might take up producing lenses in the near future if they deem that they will make more profit doing so.
It occurs to me that there is one little tricky bit for Sony in all of this, and it might end up encouraging something that will not necessarily be bad for pricing.
One of the appeals of the Tamron brand is and long has been lower prices than the OEM lenses. Right now Tamron makes lenses for (at least) Sony, Canon, Nikon, and Fujifilm, as I understand it. So the company’s success depends on producing good and less-expensive lenses for all of those brands, not just Sony.
As I understand it, Tamron also is able to leverage lens designs by applying them to products that work across brands — largely, I would imagine, by taking the optical designs and adapting the mounts and electronics to work with them.
In large part, their success relies on that — good optical designs, shared across multiple brands, and lower costs.
If you look at this from a somewhat blinkered “Sony only” perspective, I can see how having Sony own (and potentially control?) one of the popular third-party brands that Sony users rely on could look like bad news — and potentially take away one of the low cost alternatives.
However… it isn’t quite that easy for Sony to just raise those prices and keep the Tamron brand successful.
Tamron would still have to compete against the other third-party lens manufacturers in order to remain profitable. It would also have to continue to share its lens designs in products for the other brands — and we’d assume that they would have to keep the prices lower for those products… or else the whole value proposition of the company would be out the window. Which would not be a very good investment strategy for Sony.
Jul 30, 2026 at 11:32 AM
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