Mirrorless Camera Reviews

Sony launched the 42.4MP A7R III yesterday and Shutterbug was amongst a group of select media that got a chance to shoot with this new, full frame mirrorless camera at a studio shoot with dancers and performers, and then later at a nightclub with musicians.

There’s no one camera that’s perfect for everyone. Maximum resolution is a top priority for landscape photographers, while sports shooters put a premium on high-speed image capture and processing. And for some, portability or video capabilities are key considerations.

The Yi M1 is a very compact camera that offers an interchangeable lens system and is based on Micro Four Thirds sensor technology. It offers a resolution of 20MP and is able to record 4K video.

The Lumix GH5 is the new flagship camera of Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds lineup and the much-anticipated follow-up to the GH4 from 2014. The Panasonic GH5 features a new 20MP sensor that doesn’t use a low-pass filter; it also has a new image processor, dubbed “Venus Engine.”

While it might seem unusual that a camera can be both mirrorless and have a medium format size sensor, that’s exactly what Fujifilm has created with their new GFX 50S. The 51.4MP CMOS sensor size is 43.8x32.9mm, 1.7x the size of the sensor in a full-frame DSLR; the body is decidedly mirrorless, lacking a pentaprism finder and replacing it with an EVF and a tiltable rear LCD. 

In this day and age of cross-type AF sensors and AF tracking in high-speed shooting modes, a rangefinder-focusing camera might well seem an anomaly, if not a downright anachronism. Indeed, manual focusing has in large part become vestigial among photographers and their ability to focus without AF has atrophied.

I recently had the chance to take the new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II along with my regular full-frame Nikon system to Alaska and the Yukon on an outdoor shoot. Rather than test charts and pixel peeping, I focused on the real-world usability of Olympus’ new flagship mirrorless camera and its ability to get the job done as compared with a large and heavy DSLR system.