Mirrorless camera myths… busted? Do you agree?

I don’t often usually agree with everything Tony Northrup says, and this video isn’t much different. I don’t agree with all of the opinions he puts forward in this video, but he does actually makes a few valid points. The topic is mirrorless camera myths and it’s filled with fallacies often touted on social media that are just complete nonsense.

Some of the myths surrounding mirrorless cameras are just simply untrue – like mirrorless cameras being inherently sharper than DSLRs. Others might have been true at one time but no longer really are, such as mirrorless setups being smaller, not to mention the notoriously bad battery life. So, which myths are true now? Should you switch from DSLR to mirrorless?

The twenty-eight-and-a-half-minute video sees Tony and Chelsea go over quite a lot of mirrorless camera myths including the size, battery life, autofocus, continuous shooting speed, resale value and a whole bunch of other topics surrounding mirrorless cameras and how they compare to DSLRs. Not how they stomp all over DSLRs, but how they actually compare and where sometimes the older DSLR tech may actually be better than mirrorless.

For me, mirrorless still isn’t at a point where I’m completely comfortable with it for stills. I’ve tried many of the recent models from all of the manufacturers and the hailed advantages of mirrorless just aren’t an advantage to me for what and how I shoot over the DSLRs I already use. If anything, they offer me a disadvantage. I’ve yet to find a mirrorless camera EVF that doesn’t give me a headache within half an hour’s use. I’m sure eventually something will be released that doesn’t, but it’s not an issue I’ve ever had with optical viewfinders, and my DSLRs give me all I need for what I want to shoot, so I don’t see the point in “upgrading”.

I have, however, jumped wholeheartedly into mirrorless when it comes to video, having picked up five Panasonic cameras last year specifically for this task. Yeah, Panasonic’s autofocus isn’t great, but it’s very rare that I use autofocus for video anyway. I’ve tried using them for stills, where the autofocus isn’t too terrible, and they take decent shots, but the stills workflow just isn’t for me and I usually end up having to go live view on the LCD rather than using the EVF.

But my needs are not your needs. For you, jumping into mirrorless might be exactly what you need to do to improve your abilities and your work. But make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Do it with informed decision making. Don’t do it because you bought into a myth and didn’t really do your research first. You may just discover that, like an example cited in the video, your images actually get worse.

Which mirrorless myths did you buy into that turned out to be false?