Downsizing my kit

So… I got thinking the other day about how I haven’t had much time to get out taking photos recently; however I still love it and when I travel, I have all the time you could want for photography. So I realize now that I’m more of a travel photographer than anything else.

With this realization, I was thinking I would like to downsize my kit as much as possible; whilst the D90 + 16-85mm I’ve been using recently isn’t particularly bulky, there are a lot of new cameras designed to be more compact than ones based on the old 35mm film format.
So I started looking at the Panasonic GF2

and the Olympus E-PL2

both micro four third format cameras, and the Olympus one seemed to have a cool old school design that appealed to me. Then along came Sony’s answer to the compact interchangeable lens system with the NEX, but strangely, I guess because it was too different to what I was used to, having no mirror, I mentally wrote it off as a glorified point and shoot.
I decided to go to the local shop to have a closer look at the Olympus and Panasonic cameras, but after talking to the salesman and explaining how I wanted something more compact than my D90 he talked me into the NEX system, stating it has better IQ than the other two and it is obviously more compact.

I did some research and indeed the NEX cameras have much better high iso performance than the others, in fact as some testing done here shows they have slightly better high iso performance than the D90.
So in summary, the NEX cameras have better high iso performance than the other cameras I was thinking about and they are more compact too. You see the reason the NEX system is more compact is that it is the first one to be designed from ground up to be mirrorless, and whilst the other two cameras are mirrorless, the four thirds system didn’t start that way, and because the system started with a mirror, that limits how compact it can be. The reason the high iso performance is in a different league with the NEX cameras is that the chip physical size is bigger than the chip in the four thirds system.

So the long story short is that I’m selling my D90 and getting a NEX camera; though rumors have it that some new NEX cameras are coming in a couple of months as the NEX-3 is already discontinued in Japan, so I’ll wait for the new cameras to come.

I’m curious if anyone has gone from a DSLR to a NEX and have shared their story? I will certainly update with my findings once I have had some time with it. One very cool thing about the NEX is that it has such a short distance from the lens mount to the sensor that you can get lens adapters for any kind of lens; check out this cool blog: Lens Bubbles; this guy uses all sorts of old lenses on his NEX-5, though I do believe you have to change the aperture manually and focus manually. I think one day I will get a Leica lens like this, though you pay a premium for those.

 

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