EcoPix
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Regular Member
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Posts: 350
Re: Before you hit the buy button...
I use Nikon for stills and Lumix for video, in rough outback assignments. The only difference in durability I perceive is that some Lumix lenses are a bit light and easily broken.
My G85 hit a bitumen road hard a few weeks ago and was undamaged. Two weeks ago it hit concrete from 4 feet and the (cheap plastic) 14-42 lens broke off it. The camera was fine. Three days ago I was climbing through a fence and my foot caught the neck strap and the G85 with heavy 14-140 bit the dust. The lens broke off it's mount with the impetus, but the camera still works fine, after blowing all the dust off it.
On inspection, I saw that the 14-140, despite being billed as metal-mounted, is weakly made internally for its weight, with a kind of thin diecast-looking metallic material for the mount, screwed into thin plastic pedestals barely thicker than the self-tapping screws. So strength probably depends on the lens model. I doubt if my Nikon 18-140 would have suffered the same fate, given past experiences abusing it, but I can't say for sure.
I have 5 Lumix bodies and they seem tough. But Nikons are, too. A D300 fell out of a backpack once onto a sharp rock, and broke the rock. An old film Nikkormat hit a concrete bridge once, and chipped the bridge. In decades of this sort of work I've only broken 2 Nikon lenses, and that was the infamous 18-105 plastic mounted lens twice. I stopped using those. Oh, and a 24mm Ai that I tried to unscrew the filter from with a pair of multi-grips.
But don't ask me about Tamron lenses! And if you're serious about looking after your gear, the first thing you do is ban camera straps from your kit. Use a shoulder bag if you want to work with two bodies. You won't drop the one in your hand, believe me. Camera straps are the most dangerous things for cameras - they get caught on everything, drag stuff off tables, car seats etc, and pull cameras out of your hands to swing and crash.
And yes, the G85 is a revelation for video.