Quote:
Originally Posted by Birdbrain
The new mirrorless cameras have a big following. In photography, new things always get the attention. There's no gear from 1959, such as a Strat or Les Paul, that's still prized and used daily by working pros. Still, there are reasons not to buy mirrorless quite yet:
-- the viewfinder. Electronic view finders get better with every generation, but they still have limited ability to represent bright highlights and dark shadows. When I demo'ed a Fuji XT-1 on a sunny street at noon, those bright and dark details were washed out. And that was in Seattle- I work around Denver, where the brightness range is at least two stops greater. That's the beauty of the X100's hybrid VF: flick a switch and you can see the scene in true colors, which is what I prefer. Each generation of EVFs gets a little bit better, but most aren't there yet.
-- battery life. In a mirrorless camera, the battery is working all the time, reading the sensor and creating images on the EVF and rear screen. Expect your batteries to last about a third as long as with a DSLR.
I have a Fuji for casual snapshots and adapted lenses. It works well, but the shooting experience is far better, IMHO, with my DSLR Pentax. The DSLR offers me stablization with every lens I use, plus a big, realistic, real-time, no-battery-drain viewfinder.
The DSLR body is larger, but I compensate by using smaller lenses with smaller glass and apertures. Often when mirrorless coverts gripe about the size of their old DSLR (usually a Canon), they're really talking about the size and weight of f2.8 zooms they attached to them. Those lenses don't shrink much in mirrorless form. The good news is that with useable ISOs up to 1000 and beyond, those fast lenses aren't needed anymore.
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Good post, and thanks for all the thoughts!
You're quite right about the EVF at least as it applies to my now 5-year-old X-T1, the image in the viewfinder is far more contrasty that the actual capture, despite the sales pitch that you see the actual exposure in the EVF. Is the X-T3 that much better? I hear it is, but not sure it eliminates what you're talking about. It is nice however to be able to see the exposure and DOF immediately and be able to correct it by hand with a dial on top of the camera. It's very fast and intuitive. And WRT to optical viewfinders, well the captures from my 6D don't look like what I see in that viewfinder either, so there's translation either way. But I can see why folks like opticals better, it does feel so much more natural and organic. When I picked up a Sony A7III it was just so...electronic, and so much happening in the EVF with focus highlighting and everything else they throw at you. I had a strong initial negative reaction to the experience of that camera.
Battery life is bad on the Fuji X series, but is reputed to be far better on the Sony A series. They just use a much bigger battery. But yes, the EVF and the LCD are much more of a power suck. But batteries are cheap, light, and easy to swap out.
I would disagree with caveats on the gripe about size. My 6D is small for a full-frame mirrorless, and it feels comically large after using the X-T1 for a few weeks. While it's true that full-frame mirrorless have just as large and heavy of lenses as a DSLR (or very close), what's nice for me about the Fuji system is that the ASP-C lenses are much smaller, and much cheaper than full-frame lenses for mirrorless or DSLR cameras. And the sharpness of these much more modern lenses is incredible compared to the very nice L glass I have for my Canon. My Fujinon 56mm 1.2 is dramatically sharper than any L glass I've ever had. The R lenses from Canon are said to be on this level, but I haven't seen an EF mount lens that can touch it. I was genuinely surprised by this, difference, it's not subtle. You certainly don't get the same shallowness in your DOF with APS-C, but with fast primes I get as much as I'd ever want. The overall size experience with a mirrorless APS-C is quite different than a full-frame DSLR. For me I want fast lenses as I shoot in the city at night a lot, and I love the shallow DOF for portraits, etc.
Good discussion.