In February, Sigma announced the Sigma BF. It is a full-frame, interchangeable lens digital camera with only a shutter launch, a dial and three buttons. That minimalism speaks to me, and I felt the BF was probably transformative. Pictures is one among my favourite hobbies, and I’ve at all times felt trendy cameras are too difficult. After I acquired a unit of the Sigma BF to check, I needed to find it irresistible. Sadly, it could be too easy.
All of it begins with the design. The Sigma BF is likely one of the trade’s few unibody cameras. It is carved from a single slab of aluminum, a course of Sigma says takes seven hours to finish. The result’s a digital camera in contrast to any I’ve used earlier than, with construct high quality that surpasses both of my present Fujifilm fashions, the X-E3 and X-S20. Now, I do know what you are considering: The BF appears to be like like an ergonomic nightmare. Surprisingly, it isn’t too dangerous, because of the inclusion of two beveled edges the place your fingers meet the underside of the digital camera physique.
Nonetheless, it is lacking a number of options that might have made it extra comfy to make use of, doubtless because of the limitations of its unibody design. For one, a correct grip would have been good, particularly while you’re utilizing a heavy 50mm lens just like the one Sigma despatched me for testing. The BF can also be lacking a sizzling shoe mount, so third-party thumb grips are off the desk. Most annoying of all, it solely has a single strap eyelet, so in the event you do not wish to use a neck strap, you will want one which attaches to the digital camera’s tripod mount. I do not personal a type of, so I needed to carry across the $2,000 BF in my hand your entire time I used to be utilizing it. You possibly can think about how that felt.
The BF affords a really completely different capturing expertise out of your typical digital digital camera. As I discussed, it has solely a shutter launch, a single dial and three buttons (one for powering the digital camera on and off, one for reviewing your photographs and photographs and one for accessing the overflow menu). There’s additionally a touchscreen, however you would not realize it at first, as a result of apart from when choosing a spotlight level and toggling some choices, you will not be utilizing it a lot whereas capturing.
The BF’s one dial is the first method to work together with the digital camera. To regulate your publicity, you first press left or proper on the dial to cycle to a selected setting, after which spin it to tweak the degrees as desired. A second smaller display screen above the dial lets you regulate these parameters with out interacting with the primary show.
Alternatively, you may press down on the middle of the dial to open the BF’s “twin layer” menu system. Because the title suggests, Sigma has organized most of what you may want throughout two ranges of menus. For instance, say you wish to change the digital camera from matrix to identify metering. That includes urgent down on the dial, scrolling over to one of many publicity settings, tapping the middle of the dial once more, after which utilizing your thumb to press the touchscreen and allow spot metering. Accessing a lot of the settings you will want will not be as tedious, however this worst case situation demonstrates the place the expertise of capturing with the Sigma BF falls quick.
The BF is not nice for capturing fleeting moments. In ditching a lot of the bodily controls trendy cameras are recognized for, the Sigma BF makes it troublesome to vary a number of settings concurrently. I used to be most aggravated by the BF at any time when I needed to shoot a fast-moving scene.
On one among my picture walks with the Sigma BF, I noticed a father driving a motorbike along with his son within the seat behind him. With my X-E3 or practically some other digital camera, capturing that second would have been easy. I might have modified the drive mode, focus system and shutter pace independently of each other. On the BF, I needed to regulate every setting consecutively. By the point I used to be performed, the daddy and son had been lengthy gone.
A few of the BF’s shortcomings might be addressed if Sigma not less than allowed you to edit the short settings display screen to point out fewer choices. I do not want quick access to vary issues just like the side ratio, for instance. In 2025, each new digital camera ships with a very bloated menu system, and in that regard the Sigma BF is a breath of recent air. Nevertheless, permitting the consumer to make their very own tweaks would have made for a significantly better expertise.
And that’s the factor: With the BF, Sigma breaks digital camera interface conventions which might be conventions for good cause. Let me offer you one of many extra irritating examples: The digital camera inexplicably does not provide a straightforward method to measure the publicity of a scene. There was no meter to point whether or not I used to be about to under- or overexpose a shot, and I could not add one to the primary display screen.
The one manner I might see a histogram, my most well-liked technique for nailing publicity, was to entry the second layer of the interface from one of many seize settings. That is an particularly confounding resolution as a result of you may half press the shutter to make fast publicity compensation changes with the management dial, however as quickly as you do, the BF jumps out of no matter menu you had been . If digging by menus is not your factor, there are two reside view overlays you may allow to see in the event you’ve clipped your shadows or highlights. The primary is your ordinary zebra sample. The second, which Sigma calls False Coloration, turns a lot of the display screen grayscale and makes use of warning colours. Neither felt as exact as a correct publicity meter or histogram.
On paper, the BF is an honest digital camera for video, with assist for 6K recording, HEVC encoding and L-Log. Sadly, the BF’s minimalism is a weak point right here too. To begin, framing a shot is a problem because the digital camera has a hard and fast display screen. Getting usable footage can also be tough. The BF does not provide in-body picture stabilization, and whereas there are a number of L-mount lenses with built-in stabilization, most would not be sensible to make use of with the BF because of their dimension and weight.
In case you’ve gotten this far, you are most likely questioning if I’ve one thing optimistic to say concerning the BF. Properly, the most effective factor concerning the digital camera is that it takes genuinely nice photographs, which is what makes all its shortcomings all of the extra irritating. The 24-megapixel, bottom illuminated sensor and Sigma’s lenses seize and render element fantastically with out being scientific. The BF additionally has nice topic detection autofocus that makes capturing portraits of individuals and pets straightforward.
The Sigma BF has some fascinating concepts about what a digital camera can appear to be in 2025, however these concepts are sometimes marred by poor execution. As a primary stab at a minimalist digital camera, the BF has sufficient going for it, and with refinement, I might see future variations evolving into one thing particular. For instance, I’d like to see Sigma discover a method to embody a flip-out display screen within the BF’s unibody body. Till then, $2,000 is lots to ask for a digital camera that might be a lot extra.
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