Not Exactly Optimal

I purchased my first mirrorless interchangeable lens camera back in early May of this year. The Sony a6700. I also picked up three lenses to go with it. The idea was to put a lightweight and compact travel kit together. It worked. I’ve done a few trips with this camera and I’m quite pleased with the results.

I dropped about $5,000 on this Sony mirrorless kit (including extra memory, batteries and other do-dads.) I have image stabilized lenses that give me an effective focal range from 27mm to 900mm. It’s quite effective for most general photography needs I have.

What I didn’t do though, was sell my DSLR’s and replace them with full frame mirrorless bodies and lenses. I kept my Nikon D850 and D810 along with all my Nikon F mount lenses. I spent all summer working with the Sony crop sensor body and Nikon full frame bodies in my kit. It worked out fine having two different brands and types of cameras in my bag.

In the time since I got my first mirrorless body, I’ve been contemplating buying into the mirrorless kit with full frame sensor bodies. Since I’m committed to Sony mirrorless, my primary choices are the A7, A9 or A1 series of cameras. I’ve decided against a 24 megapixel full frame body, been there done that. As a matter of fact my two Nikon DSLR’s are higher resolution than the A9 series, so lets just throw the A9 out of the conversation. I want more resolution than 24 megapixels. It has to be close or better than the Nikon D850 which is 45 megapixels. It has to have equal or better image quality than the Nikon D850 and/or the D810 (36 megapixels.)  I’m not paying large sums of money to switch to something that isn’t as good, plain and simple. And when I say as good, I’m talking about using the camera and looking at the files it creates. The Nikon D850 and D810 produce some very very good image files. Both are easy to work with as well. All the extra bells and whistles and video is irrelevant for my comparison. The Sony a6700 does a darn good video so I’m already covered.

The Nikon D850 and the older D810 to some extent, are more or less relegated to being my landscape photography cameras. Yeah, they are both capable of much more than just that, and they can fill in other holes as well. But, that high resolution sensor coupled with the 24-70mm f/2.8 and the 70-200mm f/2.8 gives me a really nice image. I also have the Nikon 200-500 ED VR, but that has sort of been supplanted with the Sony 200-600mm G OSS mounted on my a6700 as a wildlife camera. So, when I look at a full frame mirrorless body to replace the Nikon D850, I can only see a few realistic choices in the Sony lineup. Add to the replacement kit, a Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 and a Sony 70-200mm f/2.8, just to get me an equivalent mirrorless kit to my current DSLR kit.

I’m not considering picking up a used Sony camera body. Not to replace the Nikon D850 at least. What’s the point of doing that? Spending money to end up where I started for the sake of what? Having mirrorless bodies?  Naa, that’s not really solving a problem. So, my current choices (November 2024) are the 50 megapixel Sony A1 at $6,499, the 61 Megapixel a7CR at $2,999, which is roughly a full frame version of the Sony a6700, or the 61 Megapixel Sony a7RV at $3,898. Each of these are good enough bodies when it comes to resolution. They have a little more resolution than my Nikon D850, so a small step up and all do a much nicer video, but I’m still not worried about video, so that’s not a deciding factor. Add to it the cost of the new Sony lenses,  the FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS II at $2,799.99 and the FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM at $1,699.99, I’m going to need to spend at least $4,000 on lenses to go with a camera that costs over $3,000. We’re up to 7-8k dollars just to replace a Nikon D850 kit with something comparable image quality wise.

I don’t think so. I don’t have an $8,000 hole in my ability to make a nice landscape photograph using the Nikon D850.

And so here is the reality of mirrorless. It’s more expensive and isn’t giving me a solution to a problem. The Sony a6700 provided me with a solution. I needed a lightweight travel kit with some decent capability. I didn’t have that with the Nikon gear. The Sony a6700 filled a $5,000 hole in my travel kit. But that was the only real hole I had in my kit. Problem solved and it wasn’t exactly cheap. I could have just stuck with the Nikon DSLR’s for my travel kit and saved some money, but I took the dive into mirrorless and solved a true problem for myself and added some additional capability to my kit with the addition of the FE 200-600mm G OSS lens, giving me a really nice upgrade to my wildlife kit, all while losing a little weight in the bag. But that’s where it stopped.

I’m arriving at a realization that mirrorless isn’t all that much better if better at all than a DSLR. The camera manufacturers, with the exception of Pentax, have shed themselves of a future lineup of DSLR cameras in favor of Mirrorless cameras and I’m just not that interested in following them down the road. Mirrorless seems more like a marketing decision to make more money than it seems like a photographic decision to give you more capability as a photographer. The mirrorless marketing has traded the buzz over photographic dynamic range to a buzz about high frame rates and better Video/Vlogging. Personally, I prefer a higher dynamic range over higher frames rates. I just don’t need more than 10 frames per second and I’m not giving up image quality to go faster. I also prefer to look through a real viewfinder such as the D850’s. It’s real time, large and I can really see what’s happening without having a video reproduction of my scene beamed into my eyes. I wear glasses and the real viewfinder is superior to my eyes, in every regard. Auto-focus in the mirrorless world has caught up to the DSLR world, finally. But, the 3D autofocus in the Nikon DSLR’s is still pretty damn good. I’m not missing shots because of it. I just don’t have AI subject detection, because they quit updating those systems in 2018 when they quit releasing newer DSLR. If they made new DSLR’s, that AI subject detection would be part of the updates, I’m sure of that. But, no, they’ve thrown an entire technology and style of gear out the window just to make you buy more expensive gear that isn’t really any better as a photographic tool, nor isn’t as enjoyable to use as a photographer. I don’t care what anyone says, there’s nothing more reinforcing and pleasing than hearing that Nikon D810 shutter fire.

So, I’ll wait. I’ll save my money. I’ll do my landscape photography with an outdated Nikon DSLR and I’ll get results that are very very good and I won’t have to live my life with a photography kit full of mirrorless replacement gear in a situation that I feel is not exactly optimal.