My Journey Into Photography: Tamron Adaptall 2 Lens and Adapter System

My first encounter with the Tamron Adaptall 2 system of lenses and adapters was with the 80-210mm zoom lens Owen let me have for a very reasonable price. In the 1970’s there was a healthy after-market for non proprietary lenses of vastly differing quality and price. Many folk stayed with the lenses designed for their camera by the manufacturer, (I will talk about Nikon lenses in a future blog), but these were expensive to buy. Many of these lenses were outsourced to smaller manufacturers to make on behalf of the Camera company and this had the effect of allowing those manufacturers to design and build lenses of their own at a lower price.

Tamron are one of those companies that started out making third party lenses and they saw a gap in the market. Many folks want to use different camera’s for different things and would often have several camera’s from competing companies. This meant they had to buy new lenses. The other lens manufacturers were happy to keep to this and made lenses in all the popular lens mounts like the Nikon F Mount, the Canon FD mount and the Pentax M42 and K mounts. That’s a lot of glass that takes time and a lot of money to research and develop.

In the early 1970’s Tamron decided to offer one system of lenses, but use a lens mount adapter to fit the lens to your camera. They introduced the Adaptall System in 1973 and it was a stroke of genius. You could use all your Adaptall lenses on all your camera’s with the separate camera specific mount that was cheaper to make. That saving was it’s selling point; Why buy two 50mm lenses for your Pentax and Nikon camera’s when one lens will fit both?. I have Nikon and Pentax camera’s and a couple of Nikon and M42 Adaptall mounts, they have served me well. Bear in mind that this was in the days of manual focus and, as you can imagine, they sold by the ship load.

My collection of Tamron lenses includes the aforesaid 80-210mm, a 28-70 midrange zoom and a 28mm wide angle. The quality is excellent and I am very happy with them. My skills at manual focusing was forced to improve as I tended to just go with my Pentax SP500 and Helios lens, but now I could get in closer with my wide angle or sit back and go for the long lens and learn about the joys of compression. If I buy a camera with a different mount, Tamron Adaptall mounts are dirt cheap and you can often buy one with a lens on ebay as it saves private sellers from paying for two listings and two lots of postage.

Tamron improved their Adaptall System to include the SP range aimed at the serious enthusiast or the professional photographer. SP was Superior Performance and, having a 35-210mm SP lens in my collection, I have to agree with them. It's a big step up in quality from the standard Adaptall range, all metal construction with 16 elements and weighs almost 2 pounds.

Tamron finally pulled the plug on the last Adaptall lenses in 2006 after 33 years of production. The big companies, Nikon, Canon, etc. had moved on to Auto Focus and Tamron had to build a range of Auto Focus lenses that, alas, had to use the camera’s specific mount on the lens, not the adapter we had come to love. The one exception is the Pentax K mount. You can still use Pentax’s original K mount manual focus lenses on the latest K-1 Digital Camera and it’s siblings. The Adaptall 2 range can still be used on it too. That’s not bad going for a 47 year old system of after-market lenses.