About a year and change ago, I was in the market for a camera. The only photography I had done up until that point was on my trusty iPhone 6s from 3 years prior. I was not a photographer then and still don’t really consider myself a “photographer” to this day.

My goal in this article is to walk you through my thought process to show you how I ended up investing my time and energy in an α6000… and why you should as well.

Note: This is a blog post targeted toward people investing in their first camera. If you’ve put significant money in another system, keep on doing you (but make the mirrorless jump anyway!).

To start, let’s go over the basics.

What’s a DSLR?

What do you think when someone mentions “DSLR”? In my experience, DSLR is used synonymously with “higher quality camera that has a cool-looking lens in front.” I’m just going to tell you outright that with a 99.9% chance, any Sony camera you encounter in the wild is not a DSLR.

Technically, any camera in the Sony α line is not a DSLR since DSLR stands for Digital Single-Lens Reflex. The “reflex” is the important part, as all DSLR cameras have a mirror inside the body. Light comes in through the camera lens, bounces off the mirror, and shoots through the viewfinder in the top and into your eye. When you fully press down the shutter button of a DSLR, the mirror flips up to allow the light coming through the lens to hit a sensor: this is the photo saved to your SD card. This flipping-up motion gives these cameras their distinctive shutter noise.

There are a couple of inherent drawbacks to any DSLR. The first one is that your viewfinder may show a different scene than what eventually is captured on your SD card since your viewfinder is typically optical (it’s just raw light coming from the lens and bouncing through a mirror or a prism), and the sensor that stores the image is inherently electronic. For higher-end cameras, this difference is negligible but for beginner cameras, this disparity can be large as noise, shutter speed, framing, and focus are affected by the electronic component.

The second one is that DSLRs are typically big. The bulky, bulbous look of Canon and Nikon cameras is due to the mirror element that adds additional heft and distance between the end of the camera lens and the sensor. Other than requiring a significantly larger body to house the mirror system, this distance (also known as the flange focal distance) limits what kind of lenses you can use on a DSLR, which we’ll get to in a second.

There are of course, many advantages to any DSLR camera and also more disadvantages, but for now, just remember these 2 things: DSLRs have mirrors that flip up, and this mirror takes up space.

What’s a MILC?

A Sony camera is not a DSLR. Sony cameras are Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Cameras, or MILCs. As the name implies, MILCs don’t have a mirror and MILCs are called “mirrorless cameras” to emphasize this key difference from DSLRs. The lack of mirror brings about 3 important consequences:

• The mirror is used in a DSLR to reflect light into the viewfinder. In MILCs, this is replaced by an electronic viewfinder, or EVF that is essentially taking a live fed of whatever your image sensor sees.
• Because the image sensor can “see” the light at all times (in DSLRs, this is covered by the camera), image processing can be done prior to depressing the shutter. This reflects a WYSIWYG paradigm that addresses the “more or less” limitation of DSLRs.
• The lack of mirror element means you can place the back of the lens right up against the image sensor, minimizing the depth of your camera body.

With a mirrorless camera, you are dealing with a much smaller and lighter body than a corresponding DSLR. You also are able to more quickly and accurately autofocus, see focus-peaking (highlighting in-focus edges to more accurately focus), turn on zebra patterning (highlighting over-exposed areas with alternating black/white lines), and at least for Sony cameras, digitally zoom in to line up your focus before shooting.

I also mentioned flange focal distance earlier. Because the mirror is gone in MILCs, the flange distance for lenses that are designed for mirrorless use is very short. For comparison, Sony E-mount lenses have flange distances of 18mm. Canon EF-mount lenses are 44mm.

A camera lens is very similar to a regular pair of glasses. A camera body might be… a nose, by analogy, with the sensor being your eye. A pair of glasses fit for someone with a large nose can be (somewhat uncomfortably) used by someone with a shallower bridge, provided a lot of padding. However, the reverse isn’t true; if glasses of someone with a smaller nose was lent to someone with a larger nose, no amount of finagling would allow them to push the glasses further into their head. By analogy, only lenses with longer flange focal distances can be used by camera systems designed for shorter flange focal distances without significant optical correction through more glass and higher cost.

In short, Canon and Nikon lenses for DSLRs are pretty easily fit onto Sony bodies. The opposite is not true. This also means that Sony, with its tiny 18mm flange distance, can take pretty much any lens you can find without much issue, provided you find a suitable adapter. This makes jumping from Canon or Nikon lenses to a Sony system much less of a strain on your wallet than going the other way.

Okay, you’ve talked too much.

I agree. I’ll wrap it up.

Sony mirrorless cameras are no less powerful than their corresponding DSLR counterparts, with cameras like the Sony α7Riv and α9ii showcasing some of the most high-performing and spectacular technology in photography today. Mirrorless cameras take full advantage of the computational power of today’s processor units whereas DSLRs are just beginning to catch up. If you’re looking to start on a photography journey, don’t go for the Nikon d3500 or Canon T6i: Pick up a Sony α6000. You won’t regret it.