I want a new camera
It’s time to think about upgrading my camera, and I don’t know what I want. I can easily justify the upgrade, because there are things I want to be able to do that my current body isn’t capable of doing. In addition, the Canon I have is going to need some maintenance soon. There are a couple of functions that make it shut down or freeze up, and the problem is the mirror getting stuck or jammed, requiring me to take the battery out and restart it.
My current camera body is a Canon Eos Rebel T5, which was an entry-level DSLR. It takes the EF and EF-S lenses, and I have several that I have purchased. One consideration is those lenses; if the next camera can’t use those lenses natively, I’ll need some sort of adapter to make them fit. It is an APS-C format, which is a smaller sensor, and I think it’s actually going to serve me better than the other format, the full-frame format. Most of my photography requires a zoom anyway, and the crop factor of the APS-C format serves that well. I do a lot of wildlife photography, so I use my zoom lenses a lot.
My T5 has 18 megapixels, which has been okay, but there are two limitations it imposes. The first is when I want to crop the image to isolate some particular element. Doing so means that I’ll just have to be satisfied with a smaller image. I’d like to be able to crop an image and still have a full-size image of good quality. The other limitation is in the details it can capture. I’d like to do some astrophotography, and while I have been able to get some star shots, I won’t be able to get the details I want from as deep in space. I won’t need to step up all that much, but it does require better quality than I have now.
The other consideration is DSLR or mirrorless. Mirrorless cameras are reported to be lighter in weight and quieter to operate, and if I stay with the same manufacturer, I should be able to stay with the lens format I have, with an adapter. Since there is no mirror to move up and down, the focus and capture speed are faster. “Burst mode” is faster with mirrorless cameras, because the mirror doesn’t have to rise and fall with each shot.
I had almost talked myself into a mirrorless system, but now I think I’ve almost talked myself out of it. Mirrorless cameras don’t have an optical viewfinder. They rely solely on a digital screen. Because of that, the battery life is a bit shorter. Additionally, from my experience with my Canon Powershot, I know that sunny days make it hard to use that digital screen. I’ve gotten used to my viewfinder, and I don’t know how I would adapt to the screen again, and my outdoor photography happens a lot on bright sunny days.
Ultimately, it’s going to take a trip to a camera shop to talk with an expert. I’ll tell them how I use my camera right now and what I want from my next one. I have a feeling I’m going to be staying with DSLR, and I’ll probably be staying with APS-C, but what that ends up looking like I’ll just have to see.