What is an M3 still good for?

Microprism wrote:

fstopx2 wrote:

Whats it good for?

Selling it and putting the money into a newer M.

I had the M, M3 and M5. I would say the M3 is marginally better than the original M but not by much. The M3 had difficulty with more EF/EFS lenses and situations than the original M. I had some lenses the M3 would not focus at all. It was only a marginal improvement over the original M IMHO.

Both the original M and the M3 take very nice pictures but they are hardly fast.

This supports my original point that the M3 is quite a nice camera for manual lenses. It has one dial less than the M6, but most manual lenses have an aperture ring so the control ring can be dedicated to shutter speeds. AF performance is irrelevant with a MF lens attached. The image quality output of the camera is not much different than the later M5 and M6 (or maybe the M which I never had).

That is if you want to focus manually . Frankly I cannot tell which camera took which picture between the M, M3 and M5.

I never cared for the M3's buttons/dials, I found them too tiny and fiddly. They took functionality that was on the screen with the original M and pushed it to buttons/dials. You end up with this hybrid operating model between the screen and buttons. I would rather do it on the screen like the original M or your favorite smartphone.

The M3 was one of the few cameras that I was sorry that I bought because there was not a huge difference between it and the original M.

The original M is very robustly build, the M3 not so much but its better the M5 and later.