Should you ditch your SLR camera and switch to a mirrorless camera?

The migration has begun, at a rapid pace. Canon and Nikon announced in 2022 that they were stopping development of their century-old SLR cameras to focus on mirrorless cameras. Gone are the optical viewfinders, which are disappearing, and with them, the set of mirrors that carry the image to the eye: everything has been replaced by a digital screen viewfinder. The change is not trivial, but it hasn't stopped many users from taking the plunge. Le Monde interviewed around twenty of them to find out what they had gained, or lost, in the process.

Many, especially among the most demanding, are seeing significant progress, enough to justify the investment. Admittedly, the image quality of hybrid cameras is barely better than that of the very latest generation of SLRs: "We are at a plateau, the improvements are marginal," confirms Pierre-Marie Salomez, editor-in-chief of Chasseur d'Images magazine. But image quality is not everything.

Autofocus, in particular, is crucial: this system allows you to choose the area in which the image will be sharp and the one that will remain blurred. However, for several years now, autofocus has made fewer errors on hybrid cameras than on SLRs. It is also more practical: "You can focus on the little flower at the very top left of the frame, and if a dog enters the image, it won't move," explains Pierre-Marie Salomez. This simplifies not only taking photos, but even more so video capture, as Baptiste Babeau, a 30-year-old engineer and author of short films, testifies: "Switching to hybrid cameras allowed me to move the camera freely without worrying about it."

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