The Black Friday Lens Scam, Charted: Six Months of Price Data Before You Swipe That Card

Every November, the same scene plays out in group chats and Facebook photography groups across the country: somebody posts a screenshot of a lens '40% off' and everyone loses their minds. We decided to find out how many of those screenshots deserve the excitement.

So starting in May, we price-tracked 20 popular lenses — a mix of Canon RF, Sony E, Nikon Z, Sigma, and Tamron glass — every single day across B&H, Adorama, Amazon, and the manufacturers' own stores. Six months. Roughly 3,600 data points. Then we waited for Black Friday week and compared.

The Number That Should Bother You

Of the 20 lenses we tracked, 13 dropped below their six-month average street price during Black Friday week. That means seven lenses — over a third of our sample — were being sold at or above prices you could have gotten in July.

The worst offender was a third-party 85mm f/1.8 that spent most of the summer hovering around $379, briefly dipped to $349 during a July promo, then got its MSRP quietly bumped to $499 in September. Black Friday arrived, the price dropped to $399, and the listing screamed 'SAVE $100.' That's not a discount. That's a magic trick.

We're not naming that brand here — yet. Their PR team can email us. But the pattern was consistent enough that we started calling it 'the September bump' in the office.

Who Actually Discounts

Some brands played it straight, and the data doesn't lie.

Sigma was the most honest player in our sample. Their Black Friday prices on the 24-70mm f/2.8 DG DN II and the 35mm f/1.4 were genuinely the lowest we logged in six months — real 15–20% cuts off actual street price, not inflated MSRP. If you've been eyeing Sigma E-mount glass, the deals were real.

Tamron ran a close second. Their 28-75mm f/2.8 G2 hit $699 during the sale week, matching its historical low from a spring promo. Not a record-breaker, but a legitimate deal.

Canon is where things got interesting. The RF 50mm f/1.8 — the famous 'nifty fifty' — saw genuine discounts, but on the bigger RF L lenses, Canon's direct store barely moved. The RF 24-70mm f/2.8L 'sale' price was within $30 of what it had sold for in August. If you shoot Canon and want L glass, your move is refurbished stock or waiting for Canon's own refurbished sales, which happen more often than people realize.

Sony was a mixed bag. Body-and-lens kits had real savings baked in; standalone lens discounts were thinner. One GM lens hit its lowest price of the year — but only for about 36 hours on a single retailer. Timing mattered more than brand loyalty.

The Lesson From the Data

Here's the thing about tracking prices for six months: you stop seeing Black Friday as an event and start seeing it as a day. Retailers run genuine sales year-round — spring rebates, Father's Day promos, back-to-school bundles. Black Friday is just the loudest one.

The lenses with the biggest gap between 'sticker price' and 'street price' were, no surprise, the ones most aggressively marketed during the sale. A lens that never actually sells for $899 isn't 'saving' you $200 when it hits $699. It's just finally being sold at the price everyone already pays.

Your Black Friday Playbook

Based on our data, here's how to shop smart:

1. Use price history tools. CamelCamelCamel for Amazon, Keepa for longer histories. Ten seconds of checking beats a $150 fake discount.
2. Screenshot prices in October. If you know what you want, note the going rate a month early. If Black Friday doesn't beat it meaningfully — we'd say 10% minimum — skip it.
3. Watch third-party brands first. Sigma and Tamron offered the most honest deals in our sample. First-party glass discounts are rarer and often shallower.
4. Consider gray-market carefully. Some 'deals' are just imported stock without a US warranty. For a $200 lens, fine. For a $2,000 zoom, think hard.
5. Don't sleep on refurb. Manufacturer refurbished lenses carried real discounts year-round and come with warranties. Our tracked refurbs beat Black Friday new-stock pricing on three of the 20 lenses.

The Verdict

Black Friday isn't a scam — but a third of the 'deals' we tracked absolutely were. The honest discounts exist, mostly on third-party glass, and they're findable with ten minutes of homework.

The best deal in our entire six-month dataset? A Sigma prime that hit its true all-time low on the Tuesday before Black Friday and sold out by Thursday morning. The shoppers who won didn't wait for the big day. They watched the data.

Now you can too.