Media365
Sigma, the Japanese camera and accessories manufacturer, has unveiled what could be the future of mirrorless cameras. Its new BF model swaps the conventional DSLR design with a minimalist approach, featuring just four buttons and a dial. The company claims the body of its new camera is milled from a single block of aluminium ingot, making it sturdier and seamless. While the design may appear as Sigma BF’s selling point, the mirrorless camera also ditches a memory card slot in favour of an in-built SSD storage, which makes data transfer faster.
Launched in the US, the Sigma BF Camera will be available for $1,999 (roughly ₹1,74,280) in black and silver. The company expects to ship the Sigma BF Camera sometime in April. The lens mounts will be sold separately.
The new Sigma BF has a 3.2-inch touchscreen display that shows “minimum necessary information.” Customers looking for an even more decluttered look can change the display settings to show no information at all. That, the company said, can help users concentrate “solely” on composition and the subject on the live view screen.
Its user interface features an entirely new information structure wherein the live-view screen shows the main shooting-centred settings, the secondary settings are in the optional menu, and management functions and other detailed settings are inside the system menu. Instead of a memory card slot, the Sigma BF camera has 230GB of internal memory that can store over 14,000 JPEG files, 4,300 uncompressed RAW images, or 2.5 hours of video at the highest-quality setting. A USB-C port helps with both charging and data transfer.
Next to the display, the camera has three physical touch-sensitive buttons with haptic feedback so they feel like real buttons. Above them is a dial that helps with menu navigation and houses a button inside with haptic feedback. There is a shutter release and a playback button on the body, “resulting in minimal physical wear.”
The Sigma BF has a 24MP full-frame sensor with a hybrid focus system, combining image phase detection and contrast detection, to capture “subjects accurately and reliably” with the help of “state-of-the-art” algorithms. The camera supports high-resolution 6K and L-Log recording for video production-level output. Sigma has equipped the BF with 13 different colour modes, which it claims will let photographers achieve the right kind of look without needing post-processing. These modes include options such as Teal and Orange, Powder Blue, and Warm Gold, along with “versatile” options like Rich and Calm.
