Hi everyone!
Today I went on a walk in a park and had a lot of fun trying to find interesting angles and subjects to snap a pic with my phone. I really loved walking around "with the eye of a photographer" and wanted to hear your recommendations on what would be a good first buy geared towards my interests. While the pictures were satisfactory from my OnePlus 12, I am aware that they would never rival the quality of bigger sensors/lenses.
I owned one DSLR back in the days but never got the interest of playing in the manual and semi-manual modes.
My ideal camera would be one relatively simple to operate but offering good specs that would make computer touch-ups (cropping, colours, balance, etc) as I think that my interest will be on detecting good capture opportunities more than finding optimal camera settings.
My guess is an entry level DSLR/mirrorless would be interesting to explore different lenses?
The products will probably be computer wallpapers (4k HDR screens) and I would love to prioritize the crispiness/resolution.
As I don't plan to do more than play with it from time to time, I am looking in the sub 1.5k $ area (new or used)
TL;DR: Looking for a worthwhile step-up from a cellphone to capture crisp wallpapers of nature/sceneries. +-1500$ new/used.
I bought my first camera a few years ago, so I can give you the advice others have told me. The lens is more important than the camera, and it’s good to get into a decent lens ecosystem. I personally use a ZVE-10 (even though I mainly do photo, as it was significantly cheaper than the A6400 in my region. Lack of EVF sucks though, so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that only wants to do photo)
If you want to go for the Sony ecosystem, the a6400 is a good pick. Lots of people also like the a6300 (older version of a6400), a6100 (older entry-level camera), and the a6000 (another older camera).
For E-mount lenses, good general-pirpose zooms would be the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 and the Tamron 17-70mm f2.8. The Sigma primes are very sharp, but lots of people also like the more affordable TTArtisans and Viltrox lenses that are almost, if not equally, as sharp.
If you prefer the Canon ecosystem, you could either go with a DLSR (bigger and heavier, but usually cheaper) or mirrorless (lighter, but a bit more expensive). I don’t know much about it though, so I can’t tell you anything more than that.
There’s also Nikon, Fujifilm, and the L-mount alliance, but I don’t know much about any of them all too much.
I remember someone told me that Sony has great AF, Canon and Nikon both have good colours, Fujifilm has film simulations + more retro control dials/design, and L-mount is a shared mount between Panasonic, Olympus/OM System, and Leica (so you can mix and match lenses and cameras between those three) and also give you M43 (sensor is smaller than APS-C, but more compact lenses). If you go with any of those ecosystems you’ll be fine, they all make good cameras.