DSLR to mirrorless migration – what to buy? | Hacker News Reader

DSLR to mirrorless migration – what to buy?

7 pointsl0b07 comments

Camera manufacturers seem to be moving at speed from DSLRs to mirrorless. In case of Canon, that means a different lens mount. Since I'll need to use an adapter for my current lenses anyway, it seems like a good time to re-evaluate brands. Some questions after using a Canon 7D:

- Is keeping my lenses and moving to a different brand of mirrorless a dumb idea in the first place?

- Can EF mount lenses be fully utilised with mirrorless cameras? That is, can I shoot pretty much the same pictures, or am I going to lose significant light/zoom/other?

- The raw image format is completely proprietary and only used by Canon. Are any of the other vendors better at making life easier for photo editing programs?

- The original firmware is not very flexible. For example, requiring an external device for continuous shooting seems crazy. Magic Lantern[1], as impressive as it is, seems to suck battery and the UI is less friendly than the original. And if I understand correctly Canon is making it harder, not easier, for third party firmware with newer models. Are there any particularly good brands for moddability (without having to be a firmware engineer myself)?

- The image quality is decent. Within similar price brackets it seems like most cameras are too similar to be a deal breaker. Is that a reasonable view?

- Light sensitivity is not great. I don't like using flash, which means pretty much anything indoors needs to be fully open and slow. Do any brands/cameras stand out in this category?

- It works decently as a webcam, except that it outputs a weird format which doesn't include microphone audio. Is this still a problem with mirrorless cameras?

[1] https://magiclantern.fm/

This is what I have

https://electronics.sony.com/imaging/interchangeable-lens-ca...

when I was looking to get a mirrorless I wanted to get a full frame camera. When I looked at reviews I saw a lot of complaining about the autofocus on entry-level full frame Canon and Nikons and that was decisive for me.

I like the selection of lenses for Sony cameras today, looking at the photos I've taken over time I even like the kit lens that came with the camera.

Consider trying a good quality flash, I get great results with

https://www.sony.com/lr/electronics/interchangeable-lens-cam...

with a bounce flash you can take pictures of people who don't look dead. You don't have to be one of those people in a 1990s ad for a redeye reduction feature. A flash even improves pictures taken during the day filling out harsh shadows.

So far as image quality, the Sony delivers more pixels than the optical system can resolve in most cases. If I zoom in really close usually the image looks less than "tack sharp" but when I look how zoomed in I am I realize that the image is just fine: I am happy with the results I get when I scale out images for the web or make prints on anything from 4x6 cards to 8.5x14.

One minus I've seen is that I sometime see moire effects. I have a picture of my barn from the top of my hill, which has a corrugated metal surface that has faint circles superimposed on it because the corrugation interactions with the stride of the pixels. Also, Sony gives you a choice between compressed and uncompressed raws where the compressed raws have some quality loss and the uncompressed raws are huge. I run with the uncompressed raws and just deal with it, I have a 14TB storage array.

I bought a Canon R6 last year, and am very happy with it. In the past, I have owned Sony Alpha A7M3, Canon Rebel XTi, Nikon D600, Nikon D7100, and Pentax K5. Canon R6 is definitely the one I am happiest with.

- All my Canon EF lenses work fine with an adapter. There is no loss of light or functionality. I bought the adapter that has a control ring[1], and this gives me an additional dial of adjustment on the lens.

- This works as a webcam on both my Windows 11 and MacOS machines using Canon EOS Webcam Utility[2]. In meetings, I often get complimented on my video, and get asked about my setup.

- Image quality is top-notch, though this is somewhat of a personal perference.

- I have an ancient version of Adobe Lightroom (v4) that I refuse to upgrade, since it has a perpetual, offline, license. I use the free Adobe Digital Negative Converter[3] to convert Canon's RAW files (CRAW) to DNG format.

- Video files contain a ton of details. I use DaVinvi Resolve to color grade, and have to use ffmgeg as an intermediate step to convert format. I am sure there is some setting in the camera I can change. However, I have scripted this process so much that this is essentially painless for me.

- The body is a bit larger that I would like in a mirrorless format. However, the ergonomics are the best I have come across. It has more dials and customizable buttons that I know what do with.

- The camera has a built in intervalometer.

[1] https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1433718-REG/canon_mou... [2] https://www.canon.de/cameras/eos-webcam-utility/ [3] https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter...

Thank you for all the details! A couple questions:

- Do you get audio when using it as a webcam? That's been the problem for me, and I remember forum posts saying there's no audio signal in the HDMI output.

- I tried using DNG, but IIRC the resulting images were huge, at least twice the size of the original RAW. What sort of sizes are you seeing?

What do you take photos of? The mirrorless "replacement" for the 7D is the recently announced R7 [0].

The R7 does have a built-in intervalometer, if that's what you mean by taking continuous photos. The other interpretation of continuous photos is holding down the shutter release and taking photos as fast as it can.

Generally, newer cameras do better in low light. Autofocus in low light is improved in the current crop of mirrorless cameras vs DSLRs.

[0] https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/d...

Nice, that's exactly the sort of detail I was hoping for! I mostly take landscape and nature detail photos (including macros with extension tubes), some pets, wild animals, very few people shots. And few indoor photos because of the low light sensitivity.

I meant to say time series/intervalometer - I was disappointed to find there was no such thing built in, and even more disappointed that the intervalometer I found could only do max 1 FPS. That being built in is a nice draw.

I use EF lenses with my mirrorless camera and I have never owned a Canon camera. Electronic adapters are (relative to the price of a camera) pretty cheap. You can keep your EF lenses and use it with almost any mirrorless camera and they will work well.

If they are full-frame EF lenses (and not EF-S) you can even get adapters (called speedboosters or focal reducers) that have additional lens elements to allow you to a larger field-of-view (very close to 35mm full-frame) and more light (approx an additional f-stop).

I would go read some reviews -- but not just of cameras, but also lens adapters.

For budget option I would go with Fuji XT30, for more professional and expensive option I recommend Sony A7 iii, or Mark IV if you can afford it. I'm very happy with Mark iii bought used for portraits and landscape photography.

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