How to choose a camera: the five questions that actually decide it

The first two questions most buyers ask are full frame or APS-C, and which brand. Both belong near the bottom of the list. Sensor size is a consequence of other decisions; brand is a consequence of the lenses you end up wanting.

The questions that decide it are duller: what you point a camera at, what the light is doing, how far you will carry it, what happens to the picture afterwards, and what you already own. This catalogue holds 61 cameras between €450 and €8,500, median 1,800. Five answers collapse that to about three.

1. 1

   What do you actually photograph?

   Not what you would like to photograph. Look at the last two hundred pictures you kept. People indoors means low light and fast lenses. Birds and football means autofocus and reach. Landscapes and buildings means dynamic range, resolution and a tripod. Those three lists barely overlap, which is why generic advice is useless. The camera finder asks this first for the same reason.

2. 2

   What is the light doing?

   Daylight is a solved problem; nearly every camera here handles it. Dusk, a lit stage and a night sky are where bodies separate. Sensor area sets the light the whole frame collects: full frame gathers about one and a quarter stops more than APS-C and about two stops more than Micro Four Thirds at the same framing. If your pictures happen after sunset, that gap is the purchase. At noon it is a rounding error.

3. 3

   How far will you carry it?

   Weigh the system, not the body. Bodies here run 154 g to 1,415 g and lenses 116 g to 2,115 g — more than three kilograms between the lightest kit and the heaviest. A full frame body under a fast zoom is one thing in a car boot and another on a hill, and the camera you leave at home has no image quality at all.

4. 4

   What happens to the picture?

   A phone screen, an A3 print, a gallery wall, a client brief. This is the only question resolution answers, and it answers it generously. The catalogue spans 9 to 102 MP; a 24 MP file prints larger than A2 at 240 dpi with room to crop. Above roughly 45 MP you are buying hard crops and very large prints, and paying for them in file size and shutter speed.

5. 5

   What glass do you already own?

   If you own three lenses on a mount, the real cost of switching is those three lenses, and it usually exceeds the body. This catalogue carries Sony E on 12 bodies, Nikon Z on 9, Canon RF on 8, Fujifilm X and Micro Four Thirds on 7 each and L-mount on 4, plus 11 fixed-lens cameras that ask nothing of you. A mount with four lenses you want beats a body that scores half a point higher.

Those five answers are what the camera finder asks for, in roughly that order. If the first answer is that you mostly photograph what your phone already handles well, read do you need a camera at all before spending anything.

There is a hierarchy in what changes a photograph, and it runs opposite to the way cameras are sold. Light is first. The lens is second. The body is third, and a distant third.

Light is free, and it is the only one of the three that can make a picture impossible. No sensor recovers a face lit from directly overhead at midday; move it two metres into open shade and the cheapest body here beats the dearest one used badly. Serious work spends its planning on when and where for that reason.

The lens is second because it sets what a viewer actually notices: how much of the world is in the frame, how much of it is sharp, and how the rest renders. Aperture is the lever, and the catalogue spans f/1.2 to f/6.3 — nearly five stops, which is the difference between hand-holding at dusk and not.

The body is third. It contributes autofocus, burst rate, the viewfinder, weather sealing, ergonomics and sensor area. Only the first routinely decides whether a picture exists at all; the rest change how pleasant the work is. Lenses before bodies makes the longer case.

The catalogue makes it concrete. Fast primes start at €220 for the Canon RF 50mm f/1.8, 250 for the Sony FE 50mm f/1.8 and 280 for the Nikon Z 40mm f/2, against a median lens price of 950. That is the cheapest large improvement most people can make.

Nearly every camera here will photograph something that holds still. Very few specs are genuine gates. Autofocus is one.

If your subject moves unpredictably — children, dogs, birds, sport — continuous autofocus with subject detection is the difference between a folder of keepers and a folder of near misses. No lens, no technique and no amount of light works around a body that cannot track.

Burst rate matters alongside it, and less than people think. The catalogue runs 3 to 40 fps, and thirty frames of a bird the camera never locked onto are thirty unusable frames. Read them in order: tracking first, frame rate second, buffer third. Autofocus and burst has the detail.

Run the five answers through the catalogue in this order and watch it collapse. Four of the five steps are pure arithmetic.

1. Mount. If you already own glass you are choosing between the 12 Sony E, 9 Nikon Z, 8 Canon RF, 7 Fujifilm X, 7 Micro Four Thirds or 4 L-mount bodies here. The other fifty do not exist for you.
2. Budget, set before you look and including a lens, a card, a spare battery and a bag. Half the catalogue sits under €1,800, and the median is the honest middle of the market.
3. Sensor size, which follows from light and weight rather than leading them: 23 full frame, 22 APS-C, 7 Micro Four Thirds, 7 small-sensor, 2 medium format. The floor differs sharply — €600 for APS-C, 700 for Micro Four Thirds, 1,500 for full frame. What sensor size actually changes has the arithmetic.
4. Level: 21 entry, 25 enthusiast, 15 pro. That maps to controls, sealing and buffer far more than to image quality: two of them with the same lens in the same light make very similar files.
5. The gate. Apply the autofocus test. For a landscape photographer it removes nothing. For a wildlife photographer it removes most of what is left.

What survives is two or three cameras that differ in ways a spec sheet cannot settle: how they feel, where the dials are, whether the menu makes sense. That is the last job.

Picking a camera up and putting it down tells you nothing. Twenty minutes with intent tells you most of what is left. Take your own card if they allow it, and do these five things.

1. Hold it with the lens you will actually buy, not the body alone. A 500 g body under a one-kilogram telephoto handles nothing like the same body under a pancake. Balance belongs to the pair.
2. Find aperture, shutter speed and exposure compensation without taking your eye from the viewfinder. If you have to look for them, you will miss pictures.
3. Point it into the darkest corner of the shop and half-press. Shop lighting is generous; a corner under a shelf is not. You are testing whether it finds focus or hunts.
4. Ask someone to walk towards you while you hold continuous autofocus, then check the frames at 100 per cent. This is the only honest in-store test of the spec that gates.
5. Shoot ten frames, then change a setting through the menu. Twice. A system that irritates you in a warm shop will enrage you on a cold morning.

If the shop will not allow it, buy online where returns are free and run the same five tests at home in the first week. Either way, check the prepared answers first: somebody has usually asked your exact question already.