For the last few years I have been travelling around the world armed with a couple of Nikon bodies and 4-5 lenses. It wasn’t until the release of the latest bunch of small mirrorless cameras like the Fuji X-T1 and the Sony A7r that I started to think about how much unnecessary weight I was hauling around with me.
Yes the image quality was excellent but I was always sacrificing mobility to get it. There was no way I was able to walk all day with all that gear in 40C heat. I often found myself leaving gear behind or not staying out as long as I wanted to due to exhaustion. When the gear starts to suck out your enjoyment, then your photography starts to suffer too.
Fast-forward to earlier this year. I’d been looking closely at the Fuji X system for a few months and I was very close to pulling the trigger. However, there were a couple of points that were playing on my mind. Many people were complaining about the autofocus in low light and the video features weren’t anything to write home about.
It was at this point that a friend suggested I try out the Panasonic GX7. I’m not going to lie; I had some poor preconceptions about Micro Four Thirds (M4/3). I had presumed the smaller sensor would make these a basic entry-level system and certainly not a system I could rely on to make money.