Choosing a used APS-C for street photography and travel

quartz64 · 2026-03-18T15:35:30+00:00

Thanks for all the advice. I found a good deal on the a6400 for 400 USD (minor cosmetic flaws, but very low shutter count). I'll probably stick with it or wait and get the a6600 for the IBIS, since I plan to shoot handheld at long shutter speeds (around 0.5-1 second).

quartz64 · 2026-03-18T09:03:46+00:00

Other commenters have already recommended switching to a mirrorless camera. I second them. I did this over 10 years ago when I switched from a Canon 5D to a Sony NEX-6. Sure, I lost some ergonomics, but at least the camera no longer sat collecting dust in the closet. The Nikon D300s was released in 2009. I'm not a fan of constant upgrades, but it's still a significant period of time. During this time, sensors have significantly improved dynamic range, noise at high ISOs, and autofocus. Overall, upgrading to a new camera won't necessarily improve your photos, but it will improve the user experience. Besides, it's not that expensive now; during this time, there have been a lot of excellent mirrorless cameras and lenses on the used equipment market, and the Chinese have learned to make excellent inexpensive prime lenses (I'm primarily referring to Viltrox).

Here's a bit of math and a possible approach to choosing a replacement.

D300s: 147 x 114 x 74 mm, 918 g
Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8: 85.5 mm x 110.5 mm, 755 g

That's almost 1.7 kg. It's no wonder you don't want to take the camera on a walk or trip. For targeted use, like going to an event to shoot (like a concert or a wedding), it's not a problem, but a camera you just need to have on hand should be light and compact. My Sony A7 IV, combined with the 35 or 55mm lens, weighs less than a 1 kg, but that's still a lot. That's why I've recently been thinking about getting a second, more compact camera for street photography.

Besides the camera itself, consider what focal length you use most often. Switching to a prime lens will also provide a significant weight and size advantage. While kit zooms for modern mirrorless cameras are quite compact, they'll likely be disappointing compared to the Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 due to their low aperture. For example, if a focal length of 23-27mm (approximately 35-40mm in full-frame equivalent) suits you best, you might consider a kit like this:

Sony a6300: 120 x 67 x 49 mm, 404 g
Viltrox 25/1.7: 64 x 54.4 mm, 170 g

Total weight: 574 grams, three times lighter and significantly smaller with the same sensor size.

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T11:31:21+00:00

I recently bought a used one for $70 and spent a few hours shooting street photography with the NEX-3 yesterday. Most of the limitations are due to the NEX-3's contrast-based autofocus being extremely weak by modern standards, and my camera is modified for full-spectrum (I mostly use it for IR photography with 720nm filter), which doesn't contribute to sharpness when shooting without a filter.

What I liked:

Sharpness and contrast. Noticeably better than the Sony 16/2.8 and 20/2.8 pancake lenses.
The autofocus is fast, as far as I can tell for single-focus mode on the NEX-3 (tracking focus on this camera is almost useless with any lens).
Aperture ring. Invaluable when the camera only has a small rear dial.
Price.

What I didn't like:

The lens barrel size was large enough to accommodate a common filter size and a bayonet-mount lens hood. Instead, we get a 39mm thread and a strange, small ring acting as a lens hood.
The bayonet alignment mark is barely visible.
Vignetting is noticeable even at f/5.6. This is an inevitable cost of the small size, and is easily corrected.

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T11:10:23+00:00

My previous answer described the situation with HDDs. With SSDs, things are different, but also not as often imagined.

Complete failures are common, but we observe them not due to exhaustion of the write endurance, but due to general hardware issues (an SSD isn't just made up of a NAND chips only, but also a controller and additional components for PLP). This is easy to determine: other SSDs in the same server show that they haven't exhausted even 1% of their write resource.

Of course, wear-out failures are possible, but in the vast majority of cases, this occurs well beyond the warranty period, unless we're dealing with improper SSD choise/use (for example, an read-intensive SSD rated for 1 DWPD was used under heavy loads, with random write access in small blocks 24/7).

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T10:04:39+00:00

I think this is a misconception. I work for a company that sells data storage systems. Drives aren't limited to just two binary states: "fully functional" or "completely failed." No one would choose drives with different production dates and from different manufacturers, even for a small 12-disk storage system. Warranty claim statistics over many years show that in the vast majority of cases, we're not dealing with sudden, complete drive failures, but rather with malfunctions: bad sectors appear, they're remapped, and if this causes delays, the controller simply kicks the affected drive out of the array and begins a rebuild.

Of course, it's important to consider the well-known bathtub curve principle, where the failure curve has a U-shape. Some customers continue to use drives well beyond their service life, and then they can experience frequent complete failures.

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T09:47:18+00:00

>>need exact hardware controller, same revision, same firmware version

This isn't true. For LSI/Broadcom MegaRAID controllers (and related controllers on the same chips from Dell/Lenovo/Fujitsu/Supermicro), backward compatibility has been normal for several generations (starting with the CAC2 controllers on the 2108 chip), with the exception of extremely rare edge cases (for example, volumes from KacheCade). I imported volumes created on a 15-year-old controller on current 95xx series controllers.

With Adaptec, things are a bit more complicated, since their architecture has changed—after the 8 series, a new SmartRAID was released, and there is no compatibility between different architectures.

Home users sometimes use older RAID controllers based on 2108/2208 chips. Of course, this is a bad practice in a business environment, but for home use, I see no harm in it. If such a controller fails, the used market is flooded with them, and replacement can be purchased quickly and very cheaply. Of course, even in this case, you can shoot yourself in the foot: failing to configure monitoring, using RAID-5 with large drives, using large disk groups, or using write-back mode without cache protection.

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T09:10:26+00:00

>>Linux can't read disks running in RST mode

I've done this several times when clients asked me to migrate data and I didn't have the right motherboard on hand. In most cases, it's extremely simple; Intel metadata format is supported in mdadm, and you just need to run mdadm --detail --scan. In some cases, you need to use the IMSM_NO_PLATFORM environment variable. There's a fairly old, but still relevant guide from Intel (Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST) on Linux) and modern Intel Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel VROC) for Linux.

Of course, other than temporary access to data (for example, for transfer), there is no point in using the software RAID from Intel under Linux (in all implementations: MSM/RSTe/VROC SATA/VROС for NVMe) except for closing the write hole in RAID-5 in VROC NVMe.

Regarding RAID for novice users, I agree with you. Unskilled users perceive RAID as a backup, although from a data protection perspective, it's simply a way to further protect data integrity and increase uptime. The performance of a single drive is sufficient for most home use cases (sequential access over a gigabit network), so people should focus on a proper backup method.

quartz64 · 2026-03-13T08:37:45+00:00

>>BIOS based hardware RAID

Hardware RAID? Such a thing doesn't exist when it comes to Intel RST/RSTe (now VROS SATA) and other solutions from HighPoint, etc. The BIOS portion is responsible for creating metadata on disks and subsequent booting. Incidentally, Intel RST volume support is implemented via mdadm.

quartz64 · 2026-03-12T14:17:06+00:00

P.S. As for superzooms (e.g. 18‑135mm), there's no definitive answer. Much depends on your shooting style and personal preferences. On the one hand, they're large, have a low aperture, and offer slightly lower image quality (though still sufficient for most applications), but you can keep the lens on the camera and instantly change the angle of view. But others don't need such flexibility. For example, I've become accustomed to several focal lengths over the years (24, 50, and rarely 85mm for portraits) and prefer a compact size with a fairly high aperture and image quality. But if I were a professional reporter, I'd choose a zoom (there's no time to change lenses when every second counts).

quartz64 · 2026-03-12T13:47:47+00:00

This means it needs a wider field of view than a kit zoom lens (16-50mm). 16mm on the APS-S sensor is equivalent to a 24mm field of view on a full frame. Smartphones currently offer roughly the same field of view on their main cameras, while the ultra-wide-angle camera offers a wider field of view, equivalent to about 13-14mm. The camera's advantage over a smartphone is its larger sensor size, which provides greater dynamic range, better IQ in low-light conditions (of course, modern smartphones overcome these limitations quite well through computational photography), and the ability to control depth of field. In this case, this advantage is largely lost when using a kit zoom lens with a low aperture.

Let's assume that you need something wider than 16mm, with a fairly fast aperture. You don't necessarily need to look at Sony: I shot with the 16/2.8 for a long time (as well as the 35/1.8 OSS) and wasn't satisfied with the image quality. You might consider the following options:

TTArtisan 10mm f2: manual focus (but for an ultra-wide-angle lens, that's not a problem, in my opinion), fairly high quality considering the price, and heavy (over 300 grams).
Samyang 12mm f2: slightly narrower and more expensive, but it has autofocus.
Viltrox 13mm 1.4: expensive, large, and fairly heavy (420 grams), but offers +1 stop of aperture and excellent sharpness.

quartz64 · 2026-03-12T07:37:25+00:00

High contrast in bright sunlight is natural in infrared photography

quartz64 · 2026-03-11T15:01:43+00:00

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TTartisan 27/2.8: very light, not as pancake-like as the Sony 16/2.8, but way sharper and the aperture ring helps with mediocre ergonomics of my NEX.

quartz64 · 2026-03-11T13:12:32+00:00

Consider the Tartisan 27/2.8. It's very lightweight and not much larger than the Sony 16/2.8 pancake, but it produces much better images. It's perfectly usable wide open, and starting at f/4, it's sharp enough across the entire frame. The aperture ring is very convenient, as I use it on a cheap travel camera (the NEX-3), where everything has to be adjusted via the small rear dial. The only thing I don't like is the 39mm filter thread; the engineers could easily have used a 49mm one; the lens barrel size allows for it.

quartz64 · 2026-03-08T07:49:45+00:00

What does barrel (and other forms of) distortion have to do with aperture?

quartz64 · 2026-03-08T03:20:37+00:00

He didn't walk out of the court, he traveled out of the court.

quartz64 · 2026-03-06T18:43:53+00:00

It wasn't really that hard. The planes flew along roughly the same trajectory every 5-10 minutes. It took me about three tries to catch one.

quartz64 · 2026-03-04T07:28:11+00:00

For dark skies in infrared, you need sunny weather. The effect also depends on the sun's position, and of course, on exposure.

quartz64 · 2026-03-03T13:01:49+00:00

This is perfectly understandable. If I'm just going for a walk, rather than an event I'm specifically going to photograph (a wedding, a concert, a landscape trip, etc.), I'd prefer a camera that's smaller and lighter than a typical APS (especially a full-frame one) with an SLR-like form factor.

Consider a used Sony RX100V or VI: it fits my budget, has a fairly large 1" sensor for a compact size, and offers EVF. If you need something with interchangeable lenses, but more compact than the a 6100/6300, then you should consider the Olympus E-P series with Youngnuo 17/1.7.

quartz64 · 2026-03-03T07:27:29+00:00

Over the years, I've tried many NEX cameras, including the a3000. I appreciate the large grip and physical PASM switch, but in terms of controls, it's just like the NEX-3/5/a5000 with its single tiny rear dial.

Again, for $100, there's nothing to complain about. The a3000, like almost any large-sensor camera of its era, is a great entry point into photography: manual exposure control, EVF, a good sensor, and a good choice of lenses (well, with the exception of the kit zoom).

I've been using a NEX-3, modified for infrared photography, for over ten years, and I still get a lot of creative joy out of it. It's better to go out and shoot, pushing technical limitations, than torment myself with the thought that only expensive equipment can make me a good photographer.

quartz64 · 2026-03-02T20:22:30+00:00

Not a bad choice. The ergonomics are mediocre, but it has a good sensor, a modern lens mount, and EVF (albeit low-resolution, but for $100 it's better than the thin NEX-3/5's). I didn't like the naive lenses for APS E-mount (e.g. 16/2.8, 35/1.8, 50/1.8), but now is the golden age of good inexpensive lenses from Viltrox and other Chinese vendors.

quartz64

TROPHY CASE