lightweight travel camera system suggestions

Apologies for the long into,

I'd like to gather some suggestions and your justifications or experiences for a lighter and smaller camera kit capable of excellent image quality kit resulting in a possible shopping spree for me.

A couple of things have come together, a nice work related bonus, and a trip to Tokyo at the end of the month unusually with a little free shopping time, so hopefully access to some the latest and greatest gear a little cheaper than available to me in the UK. I'm not at all worried about warranty transfer to England as the quality and reliability of manufacture in Japan is good and worse case I'm back for another visit in 3 or 4 months should I need to return or exchange bits.

I'm currently happily using a canon 5D3 for hobby purposes only, with a selection of faster heavy and mainly L zoom lenses. However, when traveling I feel restricted due to their size and weight. My photographic interests for a lighter kit are documenting my travelling, including a tiny bit of work related project and product stuff, but otherwise architecture, street & people and a little local landscape time permitting. The 5D3 allows me to do all of this including a lot handheld low light work pushing ISO to 6400 or worse and still giving good enough quality for me, whilst responding quickly focus wise.

I have a little experience with the first wave of the Fuji mirrorless cameras as I bought and still use a fujifilm finepix X100 (fixed lens) but this was the exact opposite. I cannot focus fast with it in poor light, (any light )but have come to love it for the colour rendition and hard to explain old fashioned film feel (smoothness/grittyness of pixels ?) , and also the good old back to manual slowing down when creating an image.

So I'm now looking for an alternative system, comprising a camera body, wide angle, FF equivalent 35mm and either a portrait like 90-135mm equivalent or a zoom covering 70-200 or greater but fairly fast so a subjects can be separated.

I can budget up to £4k for this.

Looking forwards to suggestions/comments.

Why not look at further Fujifilm options?

The XT1 and XT2 are both great cameras, and Fuji has a very interesting lens lineup.

In the end, you will have to handle some different cameras when you get to the Tokyo camera shops.

MarcBton said:

Apologies for the long into,

I'd like to gather some suggestions and your justifications or experiences for a lighter and smaller camera kit capable of excellent image quality kit resulting in a possible shopping spree for me.

A couple of things have come together, a nice work related bonus, and a trip to Tokyo at the end of the month unusually with a little free shopping time, so hopefully access to some the latest and greatest gear a little cheaper than available to me in the UK. I'm not at all worried about warranty transfer to England as the quality and reliability of manufacture in Japan is good and worse case I'm back for another visit in 3 or 4 months should I need to return or exchange bits.

I'm currently happily using a canon 5D3 for hobby purposes only, with a selection of faster heavy and mainly L zoom lenses. However, when traveling I feel restricted due to their size and weight. My photographic interests for a lighter kit are documenting my travelling, including a tiny bit of work related project and product stuff, but otherwise architecture, street & people and a little local landscape time permitting. The 5D3 allows me to do all of this including a lot handheld low light work pushing ISO to 6400 or worse and still giving good enough quality for me, whilst responding quickly focus wise.

I have a little experience with the first wave of the Fuji mirrorless cameras as I bought and still use a fujifilm finepix X100 (fixed lens) but this was the exact opposite. I cannot focus fast with it in poor light, (any light )

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Things have gotten better but your 5diii is still going to be hard to beat in low light AF with moving subjects. Still subjects you have options

MarcBton said:

but have come to love it for the colour rendition and hard to explain old fashioned film feel (smoothness/grittyness of pixels ?) ,

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????

MarcBton said:

and also the good old back to manual slowing down when creating an image.

So I'm now looking for an alternative system, comprising a camera body, wide angle,

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How wide? How fast?

MarcBton said:

FF equivalent 35mm

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Again how fast?

MarcBton said:

and either a portrait like 90-135mm equivalent or a zoom covering 70-200 or greater but fairly fast

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How fast?

MarcBton said:

so a subjects can be separated.

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So really fast........

MarcBton said:

I can budget up to £4k for this.

Looking forwards to suggestions/comments.

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The problem I see is "fast" lenses are large regardless of format. You are familiar with the speeds you like in full frame. Look up the DPR article "equivelance and why does it matter"

I travel with the Panasonic GX8 and GM5. The GM5 is really tiny and has very good IQ. The two cameras use the same lenses and have the same menu system. The m43 lenses are much smaller than your lenses and very good. There is a very large selection of m43 lenses. Check out the micro4/3 forum and see just how good the system is.

The nice thing about this system is that I can enjoy photography without lugging a heavy camera bag which just gets heavier and heavier as the day progresses.

Hal

Dr Hal said:

I travel with the Panasonic GX8 and GM5. The GM5 is really tiny and has very good IQ. The two cameras use the same lenses and have the same menu system. The m43 lenses are much smaller than your lenses and very good. There is a very large selection of m43 lenses. Check out the micro4/3 forum and see just how good the system is.

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Please read what I said. There is nothing wrong with m4/3. He may very well decide to purchase it. However..........he cannot build the same kit he has amassed in Canon ff with m4/3 and substantially save money and size

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/2666934640/what-is-equivalence-and-why-should-i-care

http://camerasize.com/compact/#312....,579.392,289.366,312.305,579.580,289.614,ha,t

The m4/3 are compared to some of his current lenses and in most of those scenarios the m4/3 product will be about TWO stops slower. I showed some Sony FF equipment to show equipment that is smaller but only ONE stop slower than his current equipment

Edit: using the same lenses on the Sony A7 would have made the canon and sony almost identical in size

Dr Hal said:

The nice thing about this system is that I can enjoy photography without lugging a heavy camera bag which just gets heavier and heavier as the day progresses.

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Completely understood. That is why some people choose this

http://camerasize.com/compact/#289.412,289.366,289.614,556,623,ha,t

If you care nothing about "equivelance" than you get your entire collection from 24-400 in a tiny package. A constant 2.8 and a 2.8-4

Dr Hal said:

Hal

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There are also options in Canikon APSC, Fuji, Sony APSC, Pentax that would be smaller than his current equipment but probably not "equivelant". Does this make any sense?

Edit 2: the OP is the one who was using terms like fast and has chosen fast lenses for his current gear. He could have chosen slower lenses that are smaller in his current format.For him to get similar results with a smaller format he would need lenses like a 35-100 1.4, a 12-35 1.4, a 25 0.7. These things do not exist. The few similar models that have been put out (sigma 35 1.8) have been yuge

The little Fuji X-T2 is a delightful little piece of kit. I've got a few more pieces to add to my Canon setup, but once that's complete, I'm genuinely considering adding the X-T2 to my arsenal..

MarcBton said:

So I'm now looking for an alternative system, comprising a camera body, wide angle, FF equivalent 35mm and either a portrait like 90-135mm equivalent or a zoom covering 70-200 or greater but fairly fast so a subjects can be separated.

I can budget up to £4k for this.

Looking forwards to suggestions/comments.

Click to expand...

I vote for m4/3 system. The lens focal length's Angle of View is equivalent to 2x FF lens focal length. For example the m4/3 25mm lens' AoV is roughly close to the 50mm AoV of the 50mm lens on 135-size sensor camera.

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Now the hardware. If I were you, I would choose Panasonic GX-8 + 15mm f/1.7 and the 35-100mm f/2.8. The whole system is so small that you may shock!

Throw in 14mm f/2.5 and 20mm f/1.7 won't cause you leg or arm at all. Both are so reliable and robust that lot of people buy the second hand instead of the ridiculous price of the new. Their size and weight are a bit problem. It's so tiny and light weight that you may lost them in the camera bag!

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About subject separation. Who'll be your subject? You travel to Japan for vacation, right? Will you bring the model with you? Yuck! So the large aperture lens is next to useless.

Japan is the scenic country. Most of the time, you need DoF. Lot of DoF!

However, if you insist on shooting model, the Panasonic 42.5mm f/1.2 should be your prime, or the Voigt 42.5mm f/0.95 if you prefer MF lens.

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Japan is camera making country There are so many second hand pre-owned camera gear shops that you might want to spend $$$ for the extra gears; because the condition of those pre-owned is almost Like New equipment, with 30% - 50% discount. Some even have the international warranty.

Last, every big towns have such decent shop.

Happy hunting!

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They offer amazing image quality for their size. At reasonable viewing sizes, the results look SLR-like, except for subject separation. If you open the lens up and zoom in, they can still do pretty well, but it is just so liberating to travel with just a compact, fixed-lens camera. I feel like for you, it will compliment your FF Canon system and Fuji X100 well.

Save the other 3200 GBPs to take a couple nice side trips and guided tours.

It may feel strange, to go to a fixed lens compact after a FF SLR, but give one a try before you discount them.

I haven't read the other responses, but I'm sure you're getting a lot of recommendations for µ4/3, APS-C with superzoom lens, etc. But having one that you can put in a jacket pocket, carry comfortably on a belt pouch or "European carryall" is just so nice.