You don’t need another camera

Yep. You heard me. Your gear acquisition needs to stop. The big revolution that was waiting to happen in cameras has happened. Mirrorless is now mainstream and DSLRs are quietly slipping into history. Your old lenses will continue to work fine with adaptors (and for that matter those lenses are getting cheaper with the new mounts taking over) until they are beyond repair. 

If you’ve bought any camera from any of the big brands in the last few years, you have enough megapixels. You’ve enough low noise. You can bracket, you can use flash and your files are simply big enough. You don’t need the next generation. The revolution is over and from here, it’ll be slow evolution and there won’t be much that will make a difference to your day to day photography. 

My last three main cameras are the Fujifilm X-T4, the X-H2s and the X-T5. I don’t use (and should sell) the X-H2s as the layout is too different and I favor the X-T4 as it’s more similar to the X-T5. I will confess to having bought the Fujifilm X100VI, but that wasn’t to use as my main camera. 

At 40MP, with IBIS, the X-T2 screen tilt design, and just generally looking gorgeous, the X-T5 does everything I need. If I’m honest, the X-T4 does the job too. I just happen to want the 40MP for cropping, and I prefer the X-T2 style screen. 

The only thing that is potentially missing is something that Sony has started to add to its cameras… a global shutter. In most cameras, there’s a finite amount of time between the first pixel and last pixel being captured. With global shutter, all pixels are captured at the same time. This prevents things like rolling shutter, where vertical objects get skewed with motion. 

Where it really shines is flash photography. Normal shutters are limited by the sync speed of the camera, which is the faster shutter speed where the entire frame is captured at once. With global shutter capturing all pixels at once, this limit goes away. It does introduce a different problem; the flash duration might be longer than the shutter speed, so you don’t get to use the full flash power during capture time! 

From a practical point of view, your long term investment is in lenses. These should be a lifetime purchase item. Buy once, buy wisely and use forever. Cameras are tools that should be replaced as necessary, but as we’re at an evolution point, you can safely skip generations and not miss out. And if you’re honest with yourself, your old camera is probably good enough. You don’t need another camera.