In February, Sigma announced the Sigma BF. It is a full-frame, interchangeable lens digicam with only a shutter launch, a dial and three buttons. That minimalism speaks to me, and I felt the BF was doubtlessly transformative. Pictures is one among my favourite hobbies, and I’ve all the time felt trendy cameras are too sophisticated. Once I obtained a unit of the Sigma BF to check, I needed to find it irresistible. Sadly, it is perhaps too easy.
All of it begins with the design. The Sigma BF is without doubt one of the business’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 digicam 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 pondering: The BF appears to be like like an ergonomic nightmare. Surprisingly, it isn’t too unhealthy, because of the inclusion of two beveled edges the place your arms meet the underside of the digicam physique.
Nonetheless, it is lacking a number of options that might have made it extra comfy to make use of, probably as a result of limitations of its unibody design. For one, a correct grip would have been good, particularly if 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 case you do not wish to use a neck strap, you may want one which attaches to the digicam’s tripod mount. I do not personal a kind of, so I needed to carry across the $2,000 BF in my hand your entire time I used to be utilizing it. You’ll be able to think about how that felt.
The BF provides a really completely different capturing expertise out of your typical digital digicam. As I discussed, it has solely a shutter launch, a single dial and three buttons (one for powering the digicam on and off, one for reviewing your images 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 technique to work together with the digicam. 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 means that you can modify 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 digicam 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 may 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 identified for, the Sigma BF makes it tough to alter 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 photograph walks with the Sigma BF, I noticed a father using a motorcycle along with his son within the seat behind him. With my X-E3 or practically another digicam, 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 modify every setting consecutively. By the point I used to be achieved, the daddy and son had been lengthy gone.
A number of the BF’s shortcomings might be addressed if Sigma a minimum of allowed you to edit the fast settings display screen to point out fewer choices. I do not want quick access to alter issues just like the facet ratio, for instance. In 2025, each new digicam ships with a very bloated menu system, and in that regard the Sigma BF is a breath of contemporary air. Nevertheless, permitting the person to make their very own tweaks would have made for a a lot better expertise.
And that’s the factor: With the BF, Sigma breaks digicam interface conventions which might be conventions for good motive. Let me provide you with one of many extra irritating examples: The digicam inexplicably would not provide a simple technique 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 means I might see a histogram, my most popular methodology 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 taking a look at. If digging via menus is not your factor, there are two reside view overlays you may allow to see in case you’ve clipped your shadows or highlights. The primary is your common zebra sample. The second, which Sigma calls False Shade, 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 a good digicam for video, with help for 6K recording, HEVC encoding and L-Log. Sadly, the BF’s minimalism is a weak spot right here too. To start out, framing a shot is a problem because the digicam has a set display screen. Getting usable footage can also be tough. The BF would 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 as a result of their measurement and weight.
If you happen to’ve gotten this far, you are in all probability questioning if I’ve one thing constructive to say concerning the BF. Properly, the most effective factor concerning the digicam is that it takes genuinely nice images, 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 superbly with out being medical. The BF additionally has nice topic detection autofocus that makes capturing portraits of individuals and pets straightforward.
The Sigma BF has some attention-grabbing concepts about what a digicam can appear like in 2025, however these concepts are sometimes marred by poor execution. As a primary stab at a minimalist digicam, 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 technique to embody a flip-out display screen within the BF’s unibody body. Till then, $2,000 is so much to ask for a digicam that might be a lot extra.
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