Recently I've been thinking about new gear, mostly cameras and lenses. This is an agonizing and frustrating process. It provides the opportunity to spend ginormous amounts of money and gain very little value from the new purchases. Even worse than that, new gear means you should take some time to seriously consider what you are doing and why you've chosen that path. Is it what you really want to do? If not, what do you really want? Will new gear help you get there?
The world is full of people will buy new gear just because it's new, it sounds like a cool product, and any number of people on the internet say it's a wonderful and must-have product. By internet standards, a camera that has 117 scene modes or the latest technology for integrating with your cell phone automatically becomes a "you have to own this to be cool" product.
You should ask yourself a simple question: When was the last time you read a photography blog or website that said a new product was poor value for money? Or that it had major shortcomings? My guess is that your answer will be never. Every new piece of gear is wonderful.
Actually I think this is mostly true. The digital camera world has advanced exponentially in the past several years, and products from the major manufacturers will all give great results. The real question to ask is this: Is the new version better in a way that's actually going to help your photography? Is going from 24 to 30 megapixels going to allow you to make better images? Maybe there is a new viewfinder, or the frame rate is faster, or autofocus is dramatically improved. All those are worthwhile improvements, but are they worth $1000? What do you really want?
I'm trying to distill my own list of what would be important for me going forward. I've been enjoying more street and landscape photography over the last year. They are widely divergent styles but they have one thing in common. Both benefit from smaller or lighter cameras since you're carrying the gear for longer periods of time or longer distances. For landscape I think 24 megapixels is the base. At photo print quality of 300 pixels per inch that makes a 13.3" x 20" print. Sure there are some tricks that can be used to go bigger, but in landscape bigger is better. More dynamic range is a help. My Sony A77 is at 13 and change for exposure range, some recent cameras like the Nikon D800 are at 14.5. I would not consider anything that has less than the A77. By the same token, to make a noticeable improvement a new camera probably needs 16 stops. That may or may not happen in 2014.
Then there is low light performance. My A77 is just average in that area. The Nex-6 is much better, but still not as good as the full frame gear from Canon and Nikon. Some cameras are certainly using in-camera post processing to improve low light performance. That's not for me. I have Imagenomics Noiseware and do that myself, and fine tune it the way I want. What I want is better low light sensor performance. Just a stop or two would be a big deal.
My plan for next year is to do more hiking and landscape photography. That means hiking into the forest, round trips of several miles and as much as 2000 feet of elevation change. So size and weight become a consideration.
Maybe the new version of the Nex-7 will be perfect. 24 megapixels is fine, I would not trade megapixels for exposure range or low light performance. The current Nex-7 is a non starter because of the issues with color shift on wide angle lenses. Can Sony fix that and still get a stop better low light performance and a stop better exposure range? It should also have good moisture resistance, be durable, and have significant weight and size advantages over the traditional DSLR body.
If it had 10-bit video at the HDMI port like the A99 and Canon 5D Mk III, that would be truly awesome. Maybe one of the new E-mount SLR style cameras will have those features, maybe not.
If I could find something with that feature set, it would be close to the ideal backpacking camera. And be totally awesome for street photography. Maybe in 2014?
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