M. Currie wrote:
I thought I'd posted here but it seems not to have occurred. Depending on how compact is compact, the recommendation of a low-end DX DSLR makes a lot of sense. I toured all over the world for a few years with a D3200. The kit lens, while pretty cheaply made, worked well. I had a 55-300 zoom in addition, which was pretty marginal in some ways, but gave a decent result. Very portable, with good image quality, and cheap enough that it would not have been a tragedy if I lost it. For the last few years I've been using a D7100, which is probably out of the range for smallness, especially with better lenses, but is still quite portable, decently inexpensive these days, and provides very good images.
I think you might be surprised at how much larger that kit is than even a midsized mirrorless. A Z50 with the kit lens in the retracted position is in fact just about the same size as a D3500 with no lens mounted and the 50-250 is noticeably smaller than the 55-300 (especially in terms of size when mounted on the body, because Z mount is 28.5mm shorter in register than F mount).
A kit like an E-M10 with the 14-42 EZ and 40-150R pair will be on par with D3500+18-55 alone in size. And that setup will cost about the same if you go with the cheaper E-M10III rather than the newer E-M10IV.
I've done the D3200 based light carry kit is a great option for a DSLR-based kit, but it's been a few years since it was really competitive compared to what you can do with mirrorless in terms of small carry.
Feb 23, 2021 at 04:38 PM
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