Cameras were long ago overtaken by smartphones, but one class of camera, the “mirrorless,” has seen a surge of interest in the past five years. Since 2019, unit sales of mirrorless cameras have grown by 150%, overtaking their predecessor, the DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera.
An amazing 5.6 million mirrorless cameras were sold last year, two-thirds of the total digital camera market, according to data gathered by the Camera & Imaging Products Association.
The stunning success of dedicated cameras raises a question in an age of smartphones with ever-rising pixel counts. Can growth continue, or is the long-term trend moving away from cameras and toward the lens you always have in your hand, purse, or pants pocket?
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“When we started this project, I was quite nervous because the image quality of smartphones has been improving a lot,” said Kazuto Yamaki, CEO of Sigma Corp., in an interview we had in New York last week. “These days, people don’t buy cameras.”
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Kazuto Yamaki, Sigma Corp. CEO
Tiernan Ray
I was talking with Yamaki at a Manhattan pop-up store the company set up for the month of March to celebrate the debut of the company’s newest mirrorless offering, the BF camera, which breaks several rules of digital camera design.
Sigma, a 63-year-old company based in Kanagawa, Japan, just outside Tokyo, is known principally for its line of camera lenses, prized by professional photographers and beloved by devotees. (Full disclosure: I own two Sigma cameras, and they are all I use for photography.) However, for nearly a quarter-century, the company has also made an unusual selection of cameras.
The BF is Sigma’s bet that a whole new audience of buyers can be lured away from smartphones by a radically simple design, a camera not so much for pro shooting, though it can do that as well, but for everyday use.
“The market has grown tremendously in recent years,” said Yamaki of the mirrorless industry, “but it was supported by the DSLR users who switched to mirrorless,” he observed.
“I think the market can grow again […] it really depends on the innovation we make. We need to adapt to a younger generation of new customers.”
“This can be a light for the future of the camera industry,” he said of the BF.
Sigma cameras are striking for their technical innovations and quirky design choices, and the BF is the quirkiest yet.
Yamaki has said in interviews that “BF” stands for “beautiful foolishness,” a phrase borrowed from a book about Japanese culture by Japanese scholar Okakura Kakuzō called The Book of Tea: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture, and the Simple Life.
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Yamaki said the intention behind the BF is to create “a camera which people want to bring every day and take pictures of our daily lives.”
At first blush, it might seem quite foolish, though the BF is also quite a gorgeous piece of industrial design.
It is a solid block of aluminum milled in a seven-hour process in the company’s Aizu, Japan factory. It comes in either jet black or very bright silver. All the edges and buttons are subtle, with little to mar its austere looks.
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Sigma Corp.
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Sigma Corp.
More significant is the novel user interface. Most still cameras have a set of dials to control features and a menu system with tons of extra options, all of which are viewed on the LCD monitor. Camera users switch between different “modes” that control features, such as shutter-priority or aperture-priority mode.
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In contrast to all that stuff, “the design concept of the BF is a modern-day camera obscura,” said Yamaki, referring to early experiments in capturing images. “The camera is originally literally a dark box; I like that very simple functionality and design.”
A camera with “simple design, simple user interface,” said Yamaki, is “the easiest camera to use. “Of course, I like the conventional camera, with a lot of buttons and dials, but sometimes, it looks too complicated,” and, therefore, intimidating to a camera buyer who might otherwise be interested in trading up from a smartphone.
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Sigma Corp.
The BF has eliminated dials and modes altogether. Instead, a large click wheel — similar to the very first Apple iPod — controls settings. Holding the camera with the right hand, you can click and rotate the click wheel with your thumb, which means the functions are all within a single gesture.
By clicking the edge of the click wheel, each of the five essential settings — shutter speed, aperture, ISO, EV compensation, and color mode — can be accessed. By rotating the wheel, the values for each setting can be raised and lowered.
Instead of looking at the values on the touch screen viewer as one does with other cameras, a second, small digital window — called a “status monitor” — sits above the click wheel and displays only the current setting. That keeps the LCD clear to show what you’re shooting.
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Yamaki is quite familiar with the new user interface and demonstrated to me how the click wheel allows him to navigate through settings quickly.
Sigma Corp.
It’s a way to consolidate the number of buttons that need to be dealt with and also to rid the screen of clutter.
I don’t have a loaner unit of the camera, and it is not shipping yet, but I tried one out at the pop-up store. It makes sense. It feels intelligent. You keep the smudgy fingerprints off of the screen, and you have the tactile reassurance of physical buttons that the photographer prizes.
Yamaki is quite familiar with the new user interface and demonstrated to me how the click wheel allows him to quickly navigate through settings. He generally shoots pictures in aperture mode on a normal camera. On the BF, he sets everything else to automatic and uses the click wheel to change aperture settings on the fly.
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“You can enjoy this camera — very quick to shoot, quick to set, there is no stress,” he quipped.
The BF breaks with custom in other ways. There’s no card slot but rather 230GB of internal flash memory storage. The BF has fasteners for a conventional camera strap, but Sigma also sells as an accessory a wrist strap, more like what you’d find with a consumer compact camera, furthering the overall consumer and leisure feel of the thing.
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The solid brick of aluminum feels very sturdy in the hand.
Tiernan Ray
Despite being simple in design, the specs are very healthy. The 20-megapixel sensor produces what appeared to me to be quite crisp images. The camera is what’s known as full-frame — with a larger sensor chip than most mirror-less cameras — which helps for low-light photography. The BF also films video in 6K resolution, up to 120 frames per second.
Also of appeal to a new audience is that the BF has some incredible in-camera editing functions. From the camera roll, you can roll the click-wheel through functions such as darkening the background or lighting up the foreground exposure, or changing the color scheme. It’s quite fluid on the crisp, roomy display. Most cameras have some post-processing like that, but I’ve never seen it in a way that is so slick and effortless. You might never have to bring your shots into Lightroom on the desktop.
The solid brick of aluminum feels very sturdy in the hand. Sigma cameras always feel very well-built.
It’s funny that the BF is such a solid, gorgeous piece of metal and glass because it is not obvious that a very successful lens manufacturer would get into cameras. Making cameras requires substantial additional investment that is not as easily monetized as the lens business. Far smaller than Sony, Nikon, Canon, Hasselblad and others, Sigma manufactures cameras without any reasonable expectation they will take over the market.
Making cameras, however, pays dividends for the lens business, Yamaki told me.
“Making cameras helps us a lot to make better optics,” he said. Seeing what comes out of the sensor informs the assembly of glass and motors in the lens that has to bring enough light to the sensor to make use of all those pixels.
And there is pride in creating, he added.
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“Of course, we still believe the lens is the most important device” in photography, he said. But, “our engineers are so motivated when they work on the camera. We love cameras, and we do this business from our strong passion.”
Not only does Sigma use cameras to inform lens design, but it has also invested in the sensor itself for many years.
In 2008, Sigma bought a high-tech Silicon Valley startup called Foveon. For most of the sensor’s life, Sigma has been the only camera maker in the world using its very special chips.
All other sensors in the world, called Bayer sensors, use a checkerboard arrangement of photosensors to capture one of the red, blue, or green elements at each pixel. Because they capture only one of the three at each pixel, the image processor has to guess or interpolate the amounts of the other two hues to get the final color.
However, The Foveon sensor captures all three — red, blue, and green — in every pixel. It does so by having a silicon chip that registers the wavelengths of light at different depths of the chip.
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A wafer of Foveon image sensors
Tiernan Ray
All that technical stuff means that, to those of us who love Sigma Foveon-based cameras, the images Foveon produces are not only extraordinarily sharp and rich in color, but they also have mysterious qualities.
Foveon sensors capture the three-dimensional quality of objects; it looks as if you could reach out and touch the object in the shot. The weight and mass of things in the picture, the feel of different textures of things, leather or stone or metal, even the feeling of the air in the room — they all show up in the shot in a way that makes Foveon pictures more real, more true than other digital pictures.
Sigma’s last Foveon camera model was in 2016. Yamaki has reiterated the company’s commitment to making new Foveon sensors and a new camera using them over the years, but every year brought word that the project had been delayed.
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That is not surprising given that Foveon is a unique chip, very big and expensive to make, and improving upon previous versions is a formidable engineering challenge.
Those of us obsessed with Foveon sensors have been waiting almost a decade for a new model, every year hoping to hear an announcement.
The BF, like the flagship Sigma camera, the fp-L, uses Sony sensors instead. They are very good sensors, but we dream of another Foveon camera.
I asked Yamaki if it was important for Sigma to own its own sensor chip.
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“It’s true, having a unique technological sensor is important,” said Yamaki. “Developing our own sensor costs a lot, so it’s quite challenging.”
Like the camera itself, the sensor informs lens design, said Yamaki. When the Foveon sensor first came out, Sigma made the first camera for it, the SD9, back in 2002.
“We realized that our lenses at that time were not good enough in terms of resolution because the Foveon sensor was very sharp and had fine micro-details,” explained Yamaki. Stepping up its game to make better lenses for Foveon sensors led directly to a dramatic boost in quality for Sigma lenses, which helped to create the appeal of the Sigma lens brand.
Beyond the practical motivations, Yamaki is clearly enamored of Foveon.
“My first daughter was born in 2000,” recalled Yamaki. “Since then, as a father of young kids, I took family pictures only with a Foveon sensor camera.”
“I sometimes look back at those pictures; those are really good pictures!” he said wistfully. “So, I really want to make a new camera with a new Foveon sensor.”
In the meantime, Yamaki has no expectation the BF will dramatically change the size and scale of Sigma’s business, just a desire that it be accepted in the marketplace and loved by its users.
“Scale of the business is not very important,” he said. “Of course, profit is very important in order to survive in this industry.”
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He said the most important thing is to make the best products, the best cameras and lenses.
“The second thing is to make our customers very happy with our company. And the third is to protect employees’ jobs.” Sigma is a family-owned company with no plans to list shares on the stock market. “I have a personal responsibility for the employees,” he said.
There’s a wait to get a BF, as Sigma produces only eight or ten units per day. You can join the waitlist for the BF via the online form. While no date has officially been given for delivery, indications at the cocktail event were that units might start to be available in late April or early May. The camera (body only) costs $1,999. Lenses are priced separately.
In the meantime, if you happen to be in the New York area, you can visit Sigma’s pop-up store in Lower Manhattan through March 29. Check out the website to reserve a timed entry.
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