Open Discussion: Help me decide my next camera

Dear readers. It’s that joyful time again. For a good few years, I’ve been using my Canon 6D – and it’s been a wonderful workhorse that has served me for the past four years and a bit (it’s been “live” since August 2013 as my primary camera).

The Canon 6D with a 100-400L Series Lens. The beast of choice.

It’s shot weddings, portraits and countless aeroplane pictures (and more often than not, my camera of choice when I’ve been doing trip reports).  But, I feel this camera is telling me it wants an easier life. Little things, like the odd performance drop, the odd mis-focus and it arguing with a lens or two.

So logically, I should be heading over to the Canon 6D Mark II and handing the readies over to Canon.

Except… there are issues with the 6D Mark II. I’ll let Kai Wong explain it..

I can get over the lack of 4K video (my servers at home would thank me for it). But the focus points is a worry – considering how centred they are (although they’re better than the 11 points on the 6D – what five year old thought that was a good idea). In addition, the focus performance isn’t what I’d call hot (especially with Canon’s Magical DualPixel system). In addition the dynamic range of the images is WORSE than the 6D.

And that’s pretty much unforgivable. Dynamic range gives me a lot when I’m recovering an image I’ve shot poorly.

If I was to describe the 6D Mark II in Computing terms, it seems like a parts bin special.

And that leaves me in a quandary. I’ve got Canon lens by the handful, so “giving up” on Canon is going to be a hard thing to do (even if I decide to resell the lenses).

So my options are:

• Migrate to a Canon 5D Mark IV – Put it like this – if I did that, I might as well start a Paetron now. It’s a LOT of cash to dump into a camera. I’m struggling to justify that.
• Consider a second-hand Canon 5D Mark III – They are out there, but I give a camera a life of 2-3 years of a camera from new. Shutter count numbers would be key, and I don’t think many second-hand vendors would like me poking around to check that.
• Switch to a 7D Mark 2/80D – That would be difficult. Shooting with a full frame has been liberating with me, without adding a crop factor of 1.6x each time
• Switch to a Sony A7 Mark II – Like a lot of Canon users who seem to be disappointed with company slow to move, they’ve jumped ship to Sony and haven’t looked back. I’ll be honest, I’m seriously considering this and chucking on a Metabones adaptor on top so I can keep the expensive Canon glass, and start shooting Sony (even after the build of the A5000 left me cold).
• – Switch to Nikon – Unless the electronic converters have improved somewhat, this isn’t happening.

I have a lot of choices ahead – and none of the them cheap sadly (unless there’s a 6D Mark III quickly that fixes a lot of the issues the device and makes the device a no-brainer).

So I’m throwing this open to all of you – thoughts and comments.

Have you lived with the 6D Mark II? Did you upgrade to the 5D Mark IV? Or did you jump ship?

Your thoughts are welcome.

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