Mirrorless Cameras

A Mirrorless Camera has no mirror box and no optical path to your eye. Light passes through the lens and lands on the sensor continuously, and you compose on an electronic viewfinder or the rear screen, both fed by that sensor. What you see is the exposure the camera will actually record, including white balance and depth of field. A difficult scene takes fewer test frames to get right. Deleting the mirror also shortened the mount to 16 to 20 mm from flange to sensor instead of 44 to 47 mm, giving lens designers room for wider and faster optics.

Set against DSLR Cameras, the mirrorless body focuses across the whole frame rather than through a separate module below a mirror, tracks eyes and animals more reliably, and shoots silently with an electronic shutter. Compact Cameras and Bridge Cameras build the lens in and cost far less to start, but cap you at their single zoom forever. Medium Format Cameras use this same layout on a 44 by 33 mm sensor at several times the price. Inside the mirrorless family the real fork is sensor size, and micro four thirds, APS-C and full frame bodies often share a shape while their kits differ by a kilogram.

Choose mirrorless if you are starting a system now, since almost every new lens released is designed for one of these mounts. It suits anyone shooting video, because the same autofocus behaves identically in stills and movie mode, and anyone who wants a small body with a really large sensor behind it. Skip it if you shoot ten hours on few batteries in the cold, if you already own a shelf of reflex lenses, or if you dislike composing on a screen, since an electronic finder still lags in near darkness and can flicker under some stage lighting.

Compare viewfinder resolution and refresh rate before pixel count, and check whether the camera keeps a live feed between burst frames or blacks out. Confirm the video mode you want is uncropped and downsampled from a higher resolution rather than line skipped. Watch heat, because small bodies stop recording after 20 to 40 minutes of 4K in a warm room. Carry two spare batteries as standard, cap the mount whenever the lens is off, and install firmware updates, which on these bodies regularly add subject detection that did not exist at launch.