In praise of crappy hardware

I’ve had the privilege and frustration of working with both the best and worst hardware of a wide variety of types. I say this independent of cost, as often it isn’t a good indicator for suitability to a given task – in fact, this is increasingly true as cost increases and your tools get more specialised. It’s also not always true given reliability issues, customer support and other general electronic weirdness and histrionics. Perhaps crappy is an unfair term that probably does the hardware in this discussion a disservice. If you haven’t noticed, the industry has been changing silently but surely: the midrange has gone high end, the high end has gone stratospheric, the bottom end is gone, and the midrange has gone downmarket. We now have multiple $3000-4000 FF ‘pro’ lenses released as par for the course and nobody blinks an eyelid (compare that to just a few years ago when only the Otuses were in that territory, and the same lenses were in the $1000-2000 range). We have the ‘low’ end of medium format now below the high end of full frame – $4000 Fuji GFX50R vs $7000 Leica M10 – and we have some true bargains at the beginner level. We have entry points into full frame at sub-$1000 (albeit in older hardware, though still available to buy new). That’s a psychologically significant number; it’s the price point of the Nikon D70 and Canon 300D back in the days of the first actually affordable DSLRs in the early 2000s. What if we go lower still?

Whilst the D3500 kit is normally $400 with the 18-55 or $450 if you feel like adding the non-VR 70-300 to the bundle, it represents the current bottom of the barrel for Nikon. (Similar options are available from Canon, but unlike the D3500, they use a much older sensor – the 18MP thing in the 4000D dates back to 2012 or thereabouts, and it shows.) Depending on your luck and timing, you could probably find an earlier D3300 or D3400 for slightly less money, but they lose out to the D3500 in one important way: the grips on those cameras are far too small, and not at all comfortable to shoot with. The D3500 finally inherits the smaller body from the D5500/D5600 (the former which I liked quite a lot) and with it, a much deeper place for your fingers to rest. It shares a sensor with the D5600, which lacks PDAF points, but is otherwise state of the art. I lucked out on mine – some idle eBay clicking one night yielded a new kit for a little over $300, shipped. At that price, I figured there was nothing to lose. The weird thing is its predecessors don’t seem to be much cheaper, if at all.

How wrong I would be. It seems that money now buys you a camera that has been through so many design iterations and minor refinements that the minor bugs have been ironed out and most importantly, the whole thing just works. There is not feature overkill, but sufficiency. It doesn’t do a lot of things, but I suspect that’s because it had to be simplified enough for the target market to be comfortable with. And that’s just fine with me. I’ve always been uncomfortable with unnecessary complexity: there is a high chance something is going to be set up in a way that you don’t want or can’t easily change precisely at the wrong time, costing you the shot. The Sony cameras have always been like this, made worse by features that can be mutually exclusive (but not explanation of why or warnings when you set one or the other). Honestly, sometimes you just miss a camera you turn on, set exposure and shoot. Yes, only the middle focus point is anything approaching reliable, but it’s good enough, and surprisingly fast with the 18-55 AF-P. I treat it as centre-focus-and-recompose and haven’t had a problem. Overall, the camera just feels snappy: instant on, very fast AF with the AF-P lenses, 5fps, good write speeds, and no waiting for menus and the like. Controls are in familiar places and muscle memory is happy to take over. Why can’t all cameras be this well sorted?*

*Actually, I know why: because simplicity doesn’t sell to gear heads, and that’s most of today’s profitable photography market.

I could go into an extended discourse on image quality, but that would somewhat defeat the point of this piece. It’s more than good enough – a clear step up on M4/3, and the JPEGs are surprisingly decent out of camera. Tonality for B&W is very good, color accuracy could be better (I find skin tones a bit too saturated) and fine detail handling is nowhere near as good as the D850/Z7 which I suspect are running much more sophisticated algorithms. Unfortunately you can’t upload custom curves, but remember again: it’s a $400 camera, including the lens. RAW file quality is of course much better – leaving little, if anything, to be desired at lower ISOs, and good quality to ISO 1600 or so. In short: more than good enough.

I don’t think too much when I use this camera. It’s cheap enough and durable enough that it usually just gets tossed into a bag naked, or into the glovebox, or something similar. It’s light enough you don’t notice it’s there if you’re already carrying a bag for something else, and feels good enough to handle and use that you don’t regret not bringing something more ‘serious’. In fact, I’d argue it’s the very lack of seriousness that is rather liberating, which in turn carries through to the way you use it. Compositions are somehow a little less rigid/ formal and more spontaneous; you experiment more; you’re okay being a little faster and a little looser – except by you, I mean me, and in that time the camera has already focused properly and you don’t have shake issues since the lens is stabilised. It actually feels much like the large format equivalent of an iPhone for photography, if that makes sense: you see something, make some adjustments on autopilot, shoot, and move on. The process is neither painful nor especially enjoyable, but the results are predictable and often surprise you for being better than you’d otherwise expect.

Outtakes: the effects of zero gravity/ return to gravity on ageing.

Actually, I lie: it feels a bit less fiddly than the Ricoh GR I recently tried (I blame that on the loss of several physical control points in the latest generation). It’s also faster in every way (especially focus) and image quality is well, pretty much identical. It’s also about 40% of the price, at least in my part of the world. You lose pocketability and half a stop of lens speed, but gain the entire 29-85mm range, an optical finder, massively better battery life, and of course access to other lenses. Living in a hot climate, you tend not to have the pockets anyway – so whatever you carry beyond keys, wallet and phone goes in a bag. Size, up to a point, is moot. But the battery life IS a big deal – I think I’ve charged the camera perhaps once since buying it, with about 2,000 frames so far. And even then it wasn’t flat – just one of the three segments fell off. If it’s as linear as my other Nikons, I could probably have gotten away with not charging it yet at all. It’s the only camera I own one battery for (and don’t feel range anxiety with).

Most importantly though, it’s one of the few tools I’ve used of late that serves as a strong and visceral reminder that photography is about images first and foremost. The tool is effective enough but also unremarkable enough that you don’t really notice or think about it and just make the damn picture – maybe that in itself does make it remarkable. Take for instance my choice of illustration for this post – Sophie was jumping on the office sofa again, trying to cross her legs in midair and land sitting down – with the flying cushions and strong graphic themes of background image and her own stripes, it felt much like Philippe Halsman’s photograph of Dali (Atomicus). We also happened to have another piece of hardware recently acquired for a specific purpose** – a Godox AD400 – on a lightstand. I did about thirty seconds of setup: move stand, turn light on, dial in 1/16 power, set camera to manual and max sync speed, pop up flash to minimum power to trigger the AD400 – and shot off a few frames. Total shoot time, a few minutes; total hardware cost, about $1000 (excluding sofa). I should probably have thrown a polar bear in there since there were no cats handy, but I didn’t want to break the spontaneity of the moment – and with a four year old, it’s seldom recoverable once lost. She (and I) are thrilled with the results. Yes, a Hasselblad and Broncolor strobes would have been better, but we’re not printing murals with it. Know your purpose and all that – I’m pretty sure social media will survive just fine.

**Very tight background highlight control using cut gobos immediately behind diffusion material

The point of all of this is of course that the result was what I envisioned; the hardware was capable enough to achieve it, but not fiddly enough to get in the way, and reliable enough not to halt proceedings. I could see the facial expressions well enough in the finder, AF was fast enough to track her bouncing, shutter lag low enough to allow careful timing (but 5fps available if needed), and flash durations short enough (1/4000s or so at T1 and 1/16 power on a 400WS strobe) to properly freeze motion – no blurry hair, no streakiness. In fact, I suspect the AD400 is the D3500 of studio lighting: color consistent to 75K, very short (0.9s at full power) recycle times; 400 full power shots on a charge with the option to run off the mains, built in radio and optical triggering as well as TTL capability; 9 stops of control, and a whole bunch of different interchangeable mounts. Did I mention a gridded snoot was all of $20? The last time I looked, you had to get a Profoto B1 for this, at many times the price, unable to run off mains with less battery life, and twice the volume and weight. The other Godox options were pretty bad, too: zero color consistency, inconsistent power and very long flash durations. It seems in the last few years whilst I was focusing on the shifts happening at the bleeding edge of the market, I somehow managed to miss arguably more signifiant changes happening at the other end. Never has it been easy to get results this good with this little effort or cost. MT

The Nikon D3500/18-55 kit is available here from B&H (get the two-lens kit if you’re feeling particularly flush) and Amazon
The Godox AD400 is available here from B&H and Amazon

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