Saturday 15 February 2014

Looking at cameras

I spent quite a bit of time today looking at cameras. I want a camera with an autofocus standard zoom lens and tilting screen to take on holiday for Mauser's wedding. I'm too slow at manually focusing with my current camera, plus it doesn't have a tilting screen and is quite large and noticeable.

I wanted a camera that would also work with my Tokina 10-17mm fisheye for doing panos. Fuji have a very good deal on their X-M1 and X-A1 cameras at the moment. But when I looked up their bracketing abilities, they can only bracket ±1EV! So it seems that if I went for one of these, then I'd need to bring my other camera as well for doing panos and sunrise / sunset images.

The Nex 6 camera has much better bracketing ability. But the problem with that is that the Sony kit lens isn't great (Photozone Sony 16-50mm review). It is also more expensive than the Fuji.

I was also concerned about shutter noise. It's a bit difficult to understand which is better, Nex or Fuji. The Fuji's have a silent mode, but from what I could understand this isn't silent. I got the idea that the Nex shutter is normally quite noisy, but is quieter if you enable electronic 1st curtain.

Reports on autofocus seemed to be that the Fuji wasn't good at continuous autofocus (so not good for anything moving). AF is not super fast, but quite reasonable.

The other thing I was interested in was getting another camera converted to full spectrum. I couldn't find any info on the Fuji 27mm lens, and only found one report on the Fuji 16-50mm lens, which stated that it worked well for IR. You can purchase already converted NEX cameras reasonably cheaply, while for Fuji you'd have to buy the camera and then pay for a conversion. I didn't check for Nex lenses fare for IR hotspots.

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