christopher_icu wrote:
A camera with no IBIS (so less clarity), but with unbeatable autofocus?
I’m confused by this part of your post. What is the association between no IBIS and “less clarity?” That’s not my experience.
Perhaps you mean more susceptible to camera motion blur at longer shutter speed? “Clarity” is a different thing than resolution or sharpness.
As to whether you would prioritize better AF or better “clarity,” that probably depends a lot on what and how you photograph, right?
In your case, given the issue with hand tremors, I think that IBIS might be ever more useful to you than to some other photographers. Perhaps these two cameras are not the only options you could consider, since there are other cameras that can give you both excellent AF and IBIS…
Two other related things:
1. Some people have pooh-poohed IBIS, for example saying “I shot without it for decades, so what do I need it now?!” Well, yes, we all did… because it wasn’t available. So we did the best we could with cameras that did not have IBIS or even any image stabilization at all. But IBIS not only has no significant downside (other than possibly a miniscule increase in camera weight) and real world upsides in a lot of circumstances that we regularly encounter. When we shoot handheld we’ll get a greater percentage of keepers at the lower end of the shutter speeds that we could have handheld without it… and we can use even longer exposure times (sometimes shockingly longer) in certain low light situations or when we want motion blur.
2. There’s a myth that having more MPs increases the need for camera stability. It isn’t quite that simple. If we made two photographs, say with a 10MP camera and a 50MP camera where both were handheld at the same shutter speed, and we reproduced the photographs at the same size… they would have exactly the same amount of motion blur. So there’s no downside to the higher MP camera relative to motion blur. There are only upsides — when we do manage to keep the camera stable we can probably produce even larger prints or other reproductions from the higher MP system.
Jul 21, 2026 at 04:25 PM
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