Sony A6000, Panasonic GH4 tested head-to-head against Nikon D4S. The result may surprise you!

 

 

There's one thing in common with the latest crop of mirrorless cameras: Pretty much across the board, their makers are claiming a huge step forwards in autofocus and burst shooting capabilities. If you're a sports shooter who's fed up of carrying a bulky DSLR, it's potentially great news, but is it true? That's the question that The Camera Store, a Calgary, Alberta-based camera retailer known for its informative videos highlighting the latest photography gear, aims to answer in its just-published Great Mirrorless Camera Autofocus Shootout.

The Camera Store video host and longtime salesman Chris Niccolls and team recently took four of the most popular mirrorless cameras around -- the Sony A6000, Panasonic GH4, Fuji X-T1 and Olympus E-M1 -- to a motocross circuit for a real-world test of their sports-shooting chops, head-to-head with the Nikon D4S. All five cameras were shooting with similar setup -- or at least as close as was reasonably possible -- as well as bright, high-quality telephoto glass and the same SanDisk Extreme Pro 95MB/second flash cards. How did they do? The results are more than a little surprising, as you'll see in the video below!

Of course, it's worth noting that it's not really just the cameras themselves that are being tested here, but also their optics. The Panasonic GH4 and Olympus E-M1 shared the same Panasonic Lumix G X Vario 35-100mm / F2.8 / Power O.I.S. lens, while the Sony A6000 bore an FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS lens. The Fuji X-T1, meanwhile, used a Fujinon XF55-200mmF3.5-4.8 R LM OIS lens, and the Nikon D4S was fitted with an AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II lens.

While The Camera Store's team did their best to shoot for a level playing field, making a direct comparison between cameras with different lens mounts and wildly-differing feature sets is challenging enough in the lab, let alone in the field. Still, we get a bit of a thrill out of the fact that a challenge like this -- against a vastly more expensive camera -- is now one worth making in the first place, let alone that the mirrorless models (especially the Panasonic GH4 and Sony A6000) managed as well as they did. The speed with which mirrorless cameras are catching up to their SLR brethren is truly staggering!

(via PetaPixel)