Know someone keen to be the next Ansel Adams or Henri-Cartier Bresson? Help take them there with the hardware or software a photographer can rely on in the modern age.
Great cameras
A great photographer should be able to take any camera thrown their way and make great images out of it — the camera is but a tool, after all — but it helps to have the best camera you can get your hands on.
Canon PowerShot G5X
Price: No official RRP, though street price is roughly $999
Canon has wowed us with some great single-lens reflex cameras before, but this year, our attention is squarely on the point and shoot variety, an area that is slowly being fed upon by the mirrorless space.
Canon isn’t letting up, though, and has found a way to get people re-interested in having an all-in-one shooter with them, and the G series could be.
Now more diverse than ever, the series offers a few cameras to choose from, and we’re eyeing the G5X, likely because of a viewfinder, 24 to 100mm lens length, and a decent ISO range for a compact hitting all the way up to 12800. Plus it looks and feels like a camera, which is always a good thing.
Samsung NX500
Price: $999
Maybe a mirrorless is more your thing and you’re keen on having something compact and phone friendly.
For that, Samsung’s NX500 is hard to look past as great bargain.
It does miss the flash, which instead arrives as an external that’s easy to lose (we may have lost ours, actually), but the camera quality is spot on, taking its sensor from the big gun NX1, and Samsung hasn’t skimped on controls either, because while it’s smaller, this 28 megapixel 4K camera may as well be the under-estimated little brother.
Panasonic Lumix G7
Price: $1199
Easily one of the coolest cameras we reviewed this year, Panasonic’s Lumix G7 features game changing technology to let you capture the event before you press the shutter, buffering constantly and recording a small video with a second on either side of when you pressed the shutter.
This tiny video is captured in 4K, which is so high resolution you can easily cut out an 8 megapixel snap out of it inside the camera.
In fact, Panasonic has impressed us even more greatly recently by bringing an update to this camera offering advanced focus changes, allowing you not just to snap the image out of a small video, but also refocus after you’ve captured the image. Crikey!
Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II
Price: $1399
A beautiful little retro-lookin’ shooter, the Mark II E-M5 is a solid update to what was still a great camera, and this time, Olympus has thrown in some particularly special additions.
We’re keen on the image quality and hand-hold already, but the included mode to let you shoot super high-resolution images by keeping the camera really still and moving the sensor slightly is a fantastic feature we’re surprised no one has thought of.
Oh, and good news, Olympus is working on a way that does this without requiring you to be a super statue!
Leica Q
Price: $5900
Pricey-as but remarkable in nearly every way, Leica’s Q is without doubt one of the best cameras we’ve ever seen, and it doesn’t even push the greatest technology in the world.
There’s no doubting this new machine is a beautiful image making box, but it’s more than just another me-too, delivering some of the sharpest and clearest glass you’ll ever see, stunning colours amidst a beautiful monochromatic mode, and a design that just exudes classic camera all throughout it.
We’re in love, and anyone receiving this as a gift would have to be, as well.
