What's Really New in Gear?
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Mark 1 Mod 0 Eyeball - likely the best gear that you can use
Let’s be honest, there is always new gear and the industry needs and wants all of us to get on the bandwagon and buy whatever is new. A gear purchase is a one time revenue bump, and there is no more revenue from you until the next purchase. So always new gear. That’s business.
The big push these days for Canon and Nikon is to get you to move to mirrorless if you are not already there and to replace your old mount glass if you have changed bodies to mirrorless. It makes good business sense.
Is there anything really new in these new cameras?
No, there is not. We will see refinements in the tech, like an expanded ISO range, or internal processing to allow for higher ISOs with no visible increase in noise, even if the sensor and CPU are the same. The story about mirrorless being smaller and lighter has overall passed into fantasy. Where camera body depth was reduced by removing the mirror box, human hands did not get smaller and in real world experience, mirrorless lenses are often larger than their DSLR equivalents. Obviously I do not include a drop from full frame to M43 in this space, because the smaller sensor allows for a smaller kit. Those cameras deliver superb image quality and when looking at a print or on screen, you aren’t going to be able to tell what sensor collected the pixels.
So more timer options, more touch functions, and potentially improved wireless transfer. As yet, nothing is simpler to go from camera to social media than the smartphone and that is more than acceptable to the largest percentage of the population taking pictures. One can even go from picture taking to photograph making on a smartphone today and if one’s goal is the fastest way to get work on the socials, this is pretty darn hard to beat as a model.
I have not yet moved to mirrorless, not because I think that the system is bad, but because a move is just an expense with no return. There is nothing that mirrorless does that my existing DSLRs do, with the exception of the electronic viewfinder and better video capture practices. If I need 4K video, I can get excellent 4K video with my iPhone or use a dedicated video camera. For 2K video, any of my existing cameras will do the job and for YouTube or Vimeo, I don’t lose anything shooting in 2K and don’t gain anything in terms of viewers or revenue from 4K. When I do, then there will be a reason to move.
I don’t need to change gear, with the substantial additional expenses of changing lenses and all my flashes and my strobe controllers and my remote tools if there is no return. I don’t care, and candidly you shouldn’t either, worry about what someone else thinks about your camera. No one gets out of your way because you have a big camera, and you don’t get special access to subjects because of your newly purchased gear, and in many cases, you may get locked out of taking your higher end camera instead of your smartphone.
Megapixel count is really just marketing since 90% of photographers never print, screens are all very low resolution and if you do 4K video that is still only 8M pixels total so your 50MP camera is either pixel binning or line skipping for 4K video.
Instead of throwing money at gear that does no more than what you can do today, consider taking a proper class, and by class I don’t mean erstwhile workshop, where the workshop is just the means to fund a trip for the organizer. Here’s a tip. If the workshop teacher is shooting, you just bought that person a trip.
You could also, as COVID restrictions east, consider going somewhere interesting to make photographs. You can make more interesting images and videos of interesting subjects than you can of uninteresting subjects.
No equipment, however well marketed will make you a better photographer or videographer. Never has, never will. By all means get new gear if it addresses a use case, or your existing gear has really hit the end of its operational life.
Remember, there is nothing revolutionary out there in gear today. On its best day its evolutionary and most of the time it’s all just marketing.
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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.
