Tamron
Tamron is a Japanese optical company. It was founded in 1950 as Taisei Kōgaku Kiki Seisakusho (泰成光学機器製作所), under the direction of Watanabe Fujio (渡辺冨士雄), and was incorporated as Taisei Kōgaku Kōgyō K.K. (泰成光学工業㈱) in 1952.[1] The company was initially based in Urawa (浦和市) (today part of Saitama City), but it moved to a new plant in Hasunuma, Ōmiya (大宮市蓮沼) (today also part of Saitama City).[1]
The company introduced the T-mount in 1957, a system of interchangeable bayonet mounts allowing the same lens to be mounted on various SLR brands.[1] The "T" presumably stands for Taisei, not Tamron: the Tamron brand was only adopted in 1961 and would not become the company name (K.K. Tamron, ㈱タムロン) until 1970.[2] The T-mount was adopted by various other optical companies. It does not provide automatic diaphragm preselection, and was superseded in 1966 by the Adapt-A-Matic system, allowing the transmission of the automatic diaphragm for various SLR cameras, itself replaced by the Adaptall system in 1976.[3]
The SP series (Super Performance) was first introduced in 1979.[4]
Tamron took shares of the Bronica company in 1995 and fully absorbed it in 1998.[5] The last Bronica products were discontinued in 2005 but Tamron is still (2007) active as a lens maker.
Links
In English:
- History page of the US official website
In Japanese:
- History page of the official website
