Personal gear review

[drd1135]

The last few days I've been stuck in a following circular dreaming:




I noticed that this cycle does, in fact, repeat.

Was Df’s high iso capability that good that mirrorless alternatives could only get to 95%? I don’t quite get that.

 

[christilou]

Seems like that time of year ...... I've been thinking I have far too much stuff of late. I hardly ever use the Leica M10. My eyesight is not what it was and although I have the evf it's still not practical for daily family photography ..... with a toddler granddaughter and a dog! I sort of feel that it's best suited for travel..... although none of us is going anywhere any time soon That leaves me with the Sony A9 which is very good for it's focussing abilities, a fairly redundant A7RIII and the tiny Sony RX1R II which I also bought for pie in the sky travel purposes. Thinking more carefully now about what I really need.

 

[Bobby Tingle]

As of now, I have the X-Pro2/X-E3/X100F for bodies. With all four Fujicrons and the 90mm F2. Plus we have my son's X-E2 and 55-230. I am well settled into this kit. My plan is to stay with these. Replacing the bodies when/if one breaks down. And possibly getting a telephoto lens down the road.

My GAS will be in the area of lighting, modifiers, backdrops, props, etc.

 

[tonyturley]

It would be silly of me to say what I'm going to do in the future, as I seem to have a history of changing my mind often with my camera gear. But for now, I have an X-E2, X-T2, and XF 18 f2, plus an adapted Pen F 38/1.8. I'm hoping the "epic Fujifilm X summit" (per FujiRumors) on October 15 has some news about the XF 27 Mk II.

 

[agentlossing]

My gear collection is a lot smaller, a little more expensive, but a lot less random than it used to be; it feels honed-in now.

 

[mike3996]

Was Df’s high iso capability that good that mirrorless alternatives could only get to 95%? I don’t quite get that.

Something like that, yes, perhaps.

The truth is that Df's high ISO was overrated from the start. Back in the day Canon 6D that wasn't much of a camera in high ISO department, was compared against Df and when the print sizes were matched, 6D was very close to Df in ISO 25.6k. And thanks to 50% more megapixels, 6D performs much more favorably in low-ISO situations.

But there's that last "5 percent" of high-ISO performance that still keeps Df in the running.

And in any event, while I exclude Sony from consideration, they would probably beat Df left-handed any day of the week.

 

[pdk42]

I've been around the houses a lot of late. I jumped into m43 back in 2012 when it was in its ascendency (from Canon FF DSLR - 5Dii) and found it a very liberating experience. I since built a decent Olympus system (including buying a 75/1.8 from @christilou) and apart from a brief dabble with a Sony A7rii some years back I've been pretty faithful to m43. Then in May this year I upgraded from the E-M1ii to the E-M1iii and was a bit underwhelmed. At about this time I'd been musing (again) about FF and liked the look of the Nikon Z system. Then there was the JIP announcement so it seemed a good time to move on and I bought a Z7 with the 14-30, 24-70 and TTArtisan 11mm fisheye (I like fisheyes). I also ordered the 24-200 but it was on back-order everywhere.

So I ran with the Nikon system over the summer and into the autumn but bit by bit I found that despite its stellar IQ, I just didn't enjoy shooting with it as much as the Olympus cameras. Then I eventually received the 24-200 that I'd had on order for months and was somewhat disappointed in it. I'd hoped for something as good as the 12-100, but it just wasn't. I need (no, I really do!) 200mm equiv FL for landscape and I realised that the only other alternative with the Nikon was the 70-200 f2.8 which is huge, heavy and pushing £2.5k!

I then went back and looked closely at the images I was producing and how I was using them and came to the conclusion that apart from the dubious pleasure of admiring the IQ at 1:1 in LR the Nikon was making no practical difference to my photography in terms of output. Worse, it was actually impeding some of the enjoyment and in fact some of the shooting opportunities (e.g. to get some shots of summer lightning storms I used the E-M1 since the Nikon has no LiveComp mode).

So, the obvious thing to do was to admit my mistake and back-track. So, I sold all the Nikon gear. The financial loss wasn't as bad as it might have been since I bought most of it as grey imports and sold it for only a couple of hundred less on eBay.

So, I'm now back with the E-M1iii, 8mm fisheye, PL 8-18, 12-100, and 40-150. I'm watching the planned Olympus 8-25 as a possible replacement for the 8-18, but other than that I'm not planning any moves at all.