I moved from Lumix m43 to Sony FF, and I experienced a few things I had only read about:
The GX80 was my primary camera up to 2018, when I bought a Sony A7III. I started a thread to discuss my motivation and reasons at that time:
My journey: M43 and FF: Micro Four Thirds Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
While I still occasionally use the smaller GM5, I haven't used the GX80 since then. Last year I sold the A7III and upgraded to an A7C. The A7C has the same size as the GX80 and I cannot imagine a situation when I would choose the GX80 instead. The GX80 is an outdated camera to me, as I'll argue below and recently I actually gave the GX80 away for free.
I have a bit of a different perspective to your experience:
1. f1.2 on FF can be REALLY difficult to get good focus. On m43 this isn't that much of a concern because of the greater depth of field.
I don't use F1.2 on FF at all. My fastest lenses are F2.8, which is fully sufficient to me. You might think that as that is equivalent to F1.4 on M43, what's the point. But actually, the availability of lenses I need was one of the major reason to move away from M43.
There are no equivalents to my most used lenses, or at least not comparable in size and price - Sony 16-35mm/4, Tamron 28-200mm/2.8-5.6, Sony 24mm/2.8, Sony 28-60mm/4-5.6. As you can see, it's impossible to reasonably replace even such mundane FF lenses on M43. The first two zooms can cover the majority of circumstances for me, but I'd need a lot of zooms and primes on M43 to get even remotely close to the same functionally.
2. My FF set does produce better photos, but not overwhelmingly so until I go to wide focal lengths and fast apertures.
To me, both FF and M43 generally offers sufficient IQ for 4K screens or A3 prints. I use very similar settings when I develop raws in LR and you couldn't easily guess which image is FF or M43, while viewing at 4K.
But FF has a larger shooting envelope, i.e. circumstances under which such sufficient IQ can be achieved. The main difference for me is higher DR of FF sensors, which solved my problems in dealing with scenes with a lot of contrast. This does not depend on focal length or aperture.
I also get more details with the 24Mpx FF sensor, which means more room to crop to me and I often exploit this in camera by using the handy APS-C mode (and a potential upgrade to a higher resolution sensor in the future will make this advantage much more pronounced for me).
But FF has IBIS as well. The GX80 has a fairly average IBIS for stills and it's not noticeably better than the implementations in A7III and A7C. 1/4s is a reasonable limit in all cases with some care (at wide to normal FL), though I generally stay at 1/8s.
4. m43 is REALLY SMALL and LIGHTWEIGHT.
Not in my experience at all. The A7C is as small as the GX80 and actually smaller than all up-to-date M43 cameras (e.g. G9, E-M5 III, E-M1 III). Equivalent lenses are about the same or often smaller on FF. M43 has only an advantage in offering slow, budget zooms, not available on FF, and maybe a couple of primes which are a bit smaller at specific focal lengths (75mm/1.8, 20mm/1.7). However, in my experience, just using APS-C lenses at 10Mpx (or APS-C crops of FF lenses) can give me a comparable IQ to these small zooms at comparable size (e.g. I used the Sony 18-135mm as a substitute for the Panasonic 14-140mm for some time).
5. To get really good lenses in either system you are going to spend $1k or more retail.
Yes, but you don't need "really good lenses" on FF to achieve better output than what those expensive lens offer on M43.
6. m43 is really good for telephoto.
While I don't shoot long telephoto, I have a completely opposite experience with mid-range telephoto lenses (14-140mm, 35-100mm/4-5.6), where the results are ok, but certainly nothing to brag about.
7. You can do a lot with post processing to make your m43 photos almost as good FF.
In some situations you can't. And after many years of using LR, I can fairly quickly achieve the potential of any image, as far as basic IQ goes (noise and detail), so I don't think "you can do a lot" here. If you mean denoising externally, then why bother? Isn't time more valuable than any savings on the equipment?
After seeing both sides of the coin, I could better spend it. So I took a few pictures with the old GX85 and 20/1.7 and I have to tell you, this little camera is amazing, and really all I need.
I completely disagree. The GX80 is outdated to me in some key areas compared to my A7C:
- dynamic range (as discussed above)
- lack of min.SS for auto ISO. That makes it almost unusable to me, as going back to constantly checking SS and switching between M and A is not acceptable to me anymore.
- outdated AF. After using subject tracking that really works (on the A7C), which allows focus+recompose with AF-C, there is really no going back to manually shifting the focus point and/or praying for face detection to work. And of course, the AF in 4K video is almost completely unusable on the GX80.
- several more factors, like poor usability of out-of-camera jpegs, slower shooting speed, many aspects related to video, etc.
- the lens system (as discussed above, though it's not strictly an issue with the body). While in some cases it still works, e.g. my Panasonic 15mm/1.7 is about equivalent to my Samyang 35mm/2.8 and I can easily use either in similar situations (maybe similarly to your 20mm/1.7), the whole system does not work for me.
That said I would probably miss the Sony 50GM (best photography experience I have ever had), but for every day situations all I would need would be this little gx85.
I know how to compose for bokeh, and for group shots, how to pay attention to the lighting, etc... and now that all of that can be put to good use, this GX85 is really an exceptional camera. Itching to go back and play with my lenses and flashes.
Anyone else go back and "discover" how good their old cameras were?
No, not really. There was no reason for me to go back to the GX80 for many years now. I go back to my GM5 sometimes, which I really love. But it has even more compromises than the GX80, so I use it less and less, as it is a frustrating experience compared to my new cameras, both in usability and results.
