system switch

It was only 2 weeks after Olympus announced that they are going to sell their camera business, I finally had the reason to switch to Sony, an idea I was contemplating about for quite a while. Only some months before this announcement Olympus released the successor of the legendary OM-D E-M1 mk2, which I own and consider as the best mirrorless camera that has been around for some years. The successor had rather disappointing specs, there was hardly and hardware upgrades (e.g. still same sensor sensor) and mostly gimmicky software features and the capability of shooting high-res pictures free-hand. None of which I was interested about. I wanted to benefit from the most recent achievements in image sensor design, lower noise and maybe the capability of writing 14-bit RAW files (VS 12-bit currently).

Now, on top of that, hearing that Olympus’ camera business is going to shift down some gears or maybe even close down depending on the kind of investor they will find I knew that Olympus is going to be a dead-end for me. But to be honest, it’s really sad, because I was always fascinated about the tech only Olympus provided among all the other camera manufacturers, such as ” Live Bulb/ Time”  or “Live Composite” and the ruggedness of their camera bodies, Sony is going to have a long way to catch up with that…

To make the story short: immediately after hearing about the news I looked for used Sony gear and got myself an Sony A7mk3 with the “holy trinity” lens setup (see photo):

• Sony FE G-master 16-35mm f/2.8
• Sony FE G-master 24-70mm f/2.8
• Sony FE 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G OSS

So far I’m still quite happy with the Sony system, although it was inevitable to gain some weight in my camera bag, but at least I finally have a sensor which is 4x the area and I’m going to have less pain in post-processing when I’ve to go down some rabbit holes to make the visible noise less noticeable in available light photos or photos which required stretching the histogram really hard. The configurability of the Sony camera is also quite nice. The only thing which still bothers me a lot is not having the option to see both the spirit level as well as the histogram at the same time in live-view. My girlfriend recently bought a cheap entry-level MFT Panasonic camera and this very setting is the default setting in this camera. Why can’t a professional line FF Sony camera have this?

In the meantime I’m glad that Nikon and Canon caught up with their mirrorless cameras too, which should create more competition and more competition is always worth to drive innovation 😉