I have a Fujifilm camera and decent lens that can do 600mm FF equiv is not cheap. I’m wondering what is the best option for bird photography at that range? There are some tiny 1/2.3 compact cameras like the Sony hx99 that doesn’t seem too good. There also seem to be an option of picking up a m43 camera with a 300mm (600mm equivalent) lens. What is everyone’s favorite options?
I’ve got an Olympus em5 iii with the 75-300. It’s not the fastest lens, but if you’re in bright light it work well for everything I’ve done with it, and the whole set up is smaller and lighter than my old Fuji with the 55-200. Handheld image stabilisation on the Olympus cameras is also impressive even at these focal lengths
I was also going to suggest m43, although I understand that the contrast-detect auto-focus (CDAF) used on most models is not the best for bird-in-flight photography. At least that’s what I recall from reading the dpreview forums. OP, it may be worth a try after you do some more research. Don’t limit yourself to Olympus only though. Lumix (Panasonic) also make excellent m43 cameras and lenses.
The body I have uses a hybrid focusing system. From what I understand it uses PDAF for finding initial focus then refines the focus point using contrast. Not all bodies do this though. The “pro capture” mode I’ve found incredibly useful. Basically buffers in busy mode, until you full press the shutter. This allows you to frame a shot and get focus where you want it, but only capture the frames immediately either side of the shutter press. Other cameras may do this, but it’s new to me and very fun
Right, as far as I’m aware, only like a couple of m43 bodies (Olympus only, I think?) have PDAF, although I haven’t really kept up with m43 releases the last few years. It’s been long-requested, but Panasonic, at least, seemed to be unwilling to do it, claiming the potential for image artifacts caused by the PDAF pixels. That’s a real possibility, but they finally relented on their latest L-mount body (S5x or something?) after the previous L-mount bodies had that the auto-focus in particular being widely criticized. Perhaps the replacements to the G9 or to the GH6 will have PDAF.