RIP: yet another great DSLR lens looks set for the chop

As the domination of mirrorless cameras in the interchangeable lens camera market continues, it’s not just DSLR cameras that are disappearing. With fewer and fewer compatible cameras, lens manufacturers have little choice but to follow suit and downsize their DSLR lens range. Third-party manufacturers like Sigma and Tamron seem to be culling the greatest percentage of their respective DSLR lens ranges, but you can’t really criticise this approach. There’s little business sense in investing valuable resources to continue the production of lenses which were designed for what’s now become an obsolete camera format.

And now it seems yet another DSLR lens may be not long for this world. According to Japanese camera rumor site asobinet.com, production of the Tamron 18-400mm F3.5-6.3 Di II VC HLD may now be “complete”, or to put it another way, it may have been discontinued.

While it’s not particularly surprising that another DSLR lens appears to have bitten the dust, this particular lens wouldn’t have been top of our list of likely candidates for being pensioned off. This APS-C superzoom lens for Canon and Nikon DSLRs is not a particularly old design, having been introduced in 2017, and it won the ‘Photo Innovation of the year 2017-2018’ EISA Award. The 18-400mm was also unrivalled in the superzoom sector, with no other lens offering this kind of focal range for APS-C cameras. Somewhat surprisingly for a superzoom lens – lenses which aren’t renowned for producing particularly scintillating image quality – we found the 18-400mm to be a surprisingly sharp lens, if quite susceptible to chromatic aberration.