I lost my Canon EOS M50 II. Basically my whole camera gear just spin off from a 3km tall mountain in Austria because I forgot to close my bag. I know...
After a month of mourning, I started to look again to the market, but It's hard to swallow. Prices are manually kept high. Affiliate links everywhere. Old gear is not cheaper. An average smartphone can record 4k video with in-body stabilization, but if you want it in a camera then the body will cost you a fortune. Lenses are not compatible with every body, technology exists for good lenses but they keep producing trash. And I have to buy the trash because of my price range.
Moreover, firmwares are proprietary. Smartphone sync apps are limited and proprietary (As a developer it's quite annoying, that they don't even let me fix their issues.) The raw format is only very rarely DNG but mostly proprietary.
I could list the injustices in the world we live in all they long.
But, I miss the image quality, and I need another one. What do you think, which brand is the least like above? What do you suggest for traveling?
(The photo has been made with my phone shortly after losing my camera, sitting there sadly, but somehow the land is so quite and calming.)
Agree on older gear being cheaper. I've taken many a great photo on my D40 ($50-75 on MPB) and D5300 ($225-325 on MPB). Depending on the focal length desired, there are solid used F-mount lenses around for fairly cheap as well. My go-to was the AF-S Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 G IF-ED VR, which is a FF lens, but it still isn't that heavy. I think I got mine used for $350 10 years ago and have to imagine the price has continued to come down. There's a lot of fast thrid and first party glass available cheap too.
My best lens for capturing the sun and moon is a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6, which sounds like pretty much the same lens you have with a different mount? I found a Kenco doubler that doesn't seem to produce any artifacts (this one goes on the back side of the lens) which has worked really well for grabbing sunspots. Wish I'd had more ambition to get out this Summer, there's been a LOT of sunspot activity that I've missed.
On the other end I have a Sigma DC 17-70mm f2.8-4 which I've been using for model trains. I paid $233 for that one so it's my most expensive, but getting a faster lens really helped with those low-light shots. Sometimes you find great deals, sometimes you find Chinese garbage. Luckily I never paid much for garbage.
It sounds like the design goals Nikon and Canon were using were similar, yes. On a crop body, it's great for capturing things far away. I used it for motorsports. It was also a good people lens, but at 110mm FF equivalent you had to have some space to use it.
I can relate to this. Especially when it comes to reach and close focus, your gear can get in the way of the shot. I feel like a lot of this hobby is clearly identifying your use case (reach, close focus, speed, etc) and then weighing the lenses that satisfy that use case against their tradeoffs (size, weight, image quality).
Over in e-mount land, I have Sigma's 35mm f/1.4 (the old HSM version) and Sigma's newer 35mm f/2.0. The extra stop is nice, but I rarely need it and f/2.0 is half the length and weight. Guess which lens gets used more often.
The nice thing about buying used is you can usually sell it without much of a loss. I've been treating this as "longer term renting" gear to help me find what I want.