Camera recommendations (1 Viewer)

[Severum]

I am curious about the mirrorless myself. I have a lot of unanswered questions like how close is the viewfinder to what I am shooting. Anyone know a really good place to rent one before making the purchase?

I think a lot of DSLR shooters will eventually end up with a mirrorless body as a second/third camera. Viewfinders have been improving and are better than a typical rear LCD. The technology has lots of room to improve and there are some fundamental advantages over a big mechanical mirror/shutter. They still aren't optimal for fast moving subjects though.

So do guys think the NEX sounds like the way to go for our purposes? I feel like my wife has all the warm and fuzzies of older methods of photography with little of the technical knowledge. I would never say that to her face! But I have to make her at least marginally in acceptance of our camera choice. She seemed happy enough with being able to manually adjust focus, aperture, and zoom with actual rings/dials. She was turned off by the amount of buttons on the Rebel SLR's.

As you can tell, this is a touchy subject. It's expensive too. So I want moderately good results.

The number of buttons and dials on DSLRs is one reason I and most old school shooters prefer them to MILCs. That makes easier to quickly change settings when shooting in manual modes.

As long as you aren't doing many action shots then any of the MILCs I mentioned should work for you. If you prefer a smaller camera and she prefers the interface then it seems like a segment tailored to your needs.

 

[Brennan77]

I think a lot of DSLR shooters will eventually end up with a mirrorless body as a second/third camera. Viewfinders have been improving and are better than a typical rear LCD. The technology has lots of room to improve and there are some fundamental advantages over a big mechanical mirror/shutter. They still aren't optimal for fast moving subjects though.




The number of buttons and dials on DSLRs is one reason I and most old school shooters prefer them to MILCs. That makes easier to quickly change settings when shooting in manual modes.

As long as you aren't doing many action shots then any of the MILCs I mentioned should work for you. If you prefer a smaller camera and she prefers the interface then it seems like a segment tailored to your needs.

Regarding action shots...why the difference in performance? I apologize for being dense here.

 

[Severum]

Regarding action shots...why the difference in performance? I apologize for being dense here.

Focus performance is typically worse than entry level DSLRs due to some technological and price constraints. DSLRs, especially mid and high end models, typically lock and maintain focus much better than MILCs. Memory buffers can also be an issue. The NEX-6 offers a nice 10 FPS RAW burst but the buffer can only hold 10 shots so speeds significantly decline after 1 second. The electronic viewfinder is also less suitable for fast action or situations where you're sitting for hours looking through an optical viewfinder for wildlife/sports shots.