I've read all the reviews. Even the ones in Mandarin. I thought about which trousers might be a most appropriate nest for this most pocketable of cameras. I dreamed about lightening my gear load. Dreamed about walking through a big city for a full day with nothing weighing me down. How could I go wrong?
Then I played with one. It's a squirrelly little dude. Kinda like holding onto a bar of slippery soap. And I shot some test shots. And I watched as the battery drained in front of my eyes. And I squinted at the rear screen and every minute of my test run I wished the camera did this or that a lot better than it does.
Someone finally sent me a big payment last week and I was, for the moment, flush with what I would call, "transitory cash." Which, it plainly says, is cash that's on the move. Either to pay for something real or to squander yet again on photo crap. But with cash at the ready I casually, slyly, almost as though on a whim, cruised to the B&H website to see about actually buying one of the most popular compact cameras on all of TikTok. Second only to the endangered species called the Fuji X100V8 or X100VI or whatever. Doesn't matter what you call the faux rangefinder Fuji because you can only get them by trading a kidney on Ebay. And even then you might not get what you asked for. Almost certainly not.
When I arrived at the B&H website I was crestfallen to find that all the variants of the GR111 were back-ordered and out of stock. So I bought some of Charles Manson's Elon Musk's crypto currency instead and called it a day. When I dropped back by B&H this evening, days after my first visit in search of GRs several of the models were back in stock but try as I might I couldn't work up the necessary enthusiasm required to go through with the usual reckless buying transaction.
Why? I blame the camera I'm showcasing here. Now. It's the original Sigma fp and it's not much bigger than the GRIII. Well it is bigger where it counts --- in several places. First of all it has a bigger, juicier, full frame sensor. Not just a full frame sensor but a back side illuminated (BSI), 24 megapixel sensor. The second place where it is positively engorged by comparison is in the size of the battery. It's not a great battery but it sure is bigger than the skinny sliver of a battery in the GRs.
It handles the same as the GRIII cameras in that one looks at a rear screen to compose and shoot. And it's small. But to be fair it's not quite small enough that one's Levis are going to swallow up the camera in one of the pockets.... But you can always store an extra SD card in the watch pocket!
Left in a barebones configuration the Sigma is small and unobtrusive. But the fact that it can be configured for lots of different (and professional) uses is a huge plus. Here's the secret to my preference for the Sigma over the TikToker photo favorite ---- the fp has the ability to use all L mount lenses and since it has an L lens mount you can also, with adapters, use all of your Leica, Voitlander and Zeiss lenses on the camera. If you want flexibility with the GR111 cameras, with their fixed lenses, you'll need two. One for wide angle vistas and one for normal photography. That can be a lot to juggle. And two takes up prodigious pocket space.
With the Sigma you can go from an ultra wide angle lens to an extreme telephoto lens and everything in between. Pretty much everything fits. I've even had old Nikon F lenses on the front of the little machine. With the GRs you choose on nearly normal focal length or one ubiquitous semi-wide angle focal length and that's it. For all time. No matter how much your tastes or travels change.
I can tell you right now that the Sigma is a much more rugged camera. And it has a big heat sink on the back, under the screen, so you can keep shooting with it even as you are personally succumbing to heat exhaustion under a glowering sun.
I like using the fp with the Sigma 45mm f2.8. They seem made for each other. But some will shame you in 2024-2025 if you aren't zeroed right in at 40mm. Not to be sidelined I found a 40mm f1.4 Voigtlander lens (VM) in the drawer and an adapter to mount the lens on any L mount camera. Voila. Now I have a 40mm on my fp camera and it's two full stops faster than the lens on the GR. Trade-off? yeah. You get to manually focus it.
If you are intent on shooting video with either camera you'll find the fp much better spec'd out and you have the option of outputting raw video files via the micro-HDMI port to an Atomos Ninja monitor/recorder. Win, win, win. In desperate need of an EVF on your camera of choice? No go on the GR. Yes go on the fp. It's kludgy but it works and the image in the finder is really good.
The fp is also exceedingly weather resistant, and smackdown resistant. And if you are a contrarian you'll find far fewer fellow influencees running around doing street photography with the fp than with one of the various GRs. I guess it's all of this and a bit more that keeps me from rushing out and buying yet another little plastic compact camera. That, and the realization that I already spent the transitory cash.
Save yourself while there's time. The influencers are coming for you.
The fp and the GR IIIx are the two cameras I alternate between on a daily basis. I love both of them. They’re both among the tiniest “good” cameras I’ve ever touched.
ReplyDeleteI love how configurable the Sigma is. i’ve designed a custom grip for it as and built a collapsible version of the LCD finder. The sigma takes excellent images, and the little light performance is dramatically better than the Ricoh’s.
But there are a couple of things that seem to keep the GR in its spot as my everyday camera:
It really is a lot smaller, even with a body cap style lens on the fp.
It is dramatically lighter, which matters a lot when I’m just gonna let it hang out, slung over my shoulder for the day.
It has a physical shutter, which means that it deals much better with indoor lighting without having to be careful attention to my shutter speed.
It is incredibly fast to start up. When I’m using the fp while walking around, I miss the shot way too often because it just took an extra couple seconds to wake up.
But really, I love both of them.
I'm still using my 10-year-old Nikon Coolpix A. The smallest and best pocketable APS-C camera around. Have no intention at all to shell out $1000-2000 on the mentioned cameras even though the Sigma fp looks interesting :-)
ReplyDeleteA trash can was my primary editing tool (along with a lightbox and a loupe) when I shot a lot of K64. Remember those 50-roll part packs?
ReplyDeleteKirk - like you, I have been looking at the latest and greatest and comparing it to what I already have. I have decided to use what I already have, allowing myself to make selective purchases of things like extra batteries and useful accessories. I have a budget to work within, and the latest and greatest represents an unnecessary purchase at this moment.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure one needed to shoot thousands and thousands of rolls of Kodachrome to appreciate the film. I shot dozens and dozens of rolls of 35mm K64 back in the day, along with the odd roll of 35mm K25 and K200, and a roll of 120-format Kodachrome (64?) along the way. I think I shot my last roll of Kodachrome film sometime in 1990. Images shot with that film had a quality that was pleasing to me, which is why I shot extensively (by my standards) with it back in the day. But I shot much more Fujichrome 100 and Provia 100 (usually pushed to 200) over the years. (I liked looking at processed transparency-film images on light tables, aided by a high-quality Schneider loupe.) I am guessing nostalgia is the main factor in the recent surge in interest in Kodachrome. Sort of like old digicams have a certain cachet about them these days.