No, this is not the worship of evil, but simply my thoughts on camera technology, which has undergone the greatest changes in recent times and from which the most new systems have emerged - EVIL cameras, i.e. cameras with Electronic Viewfinder and Interchangeable Lenses. Whether it's the Micro-4/3 system from Panasonic or Olympus, or the NEX system from Sony, or one of the other new systems in the category. I am always amazed how much this has changed photography for me - simply through the availability of really compact cameras that I actually have with me.
Until a few years ago, I still had a Canon EOS 10D - a really great device with good image quality and the performance of the usual digital SLRs. Ok, towards the end it was no longer up to date, there were already several new generations (when I sold it, the 50D had just come out), but that didn't matter to me - the image quality left nothing to be desired.
But the size! The camera itself was not exactly small (though not as big a monster as the usual professional devices), but the lenses were really heavy. I only had a few lenses - mainly the 35/1.4L and the 100/2.8 Macro (my autocorrect just wanted to correct that to Macho - considering the weight, perhaps not entirely wrong). Take the camera with both lenses? Uh, no thanks, rather not. And when I had them with me, it was just a camera with quite classic functions. Video, just because you see something funny that you want to capture as a little film? No.
Ok, today many DSLRs also have live view and filming, but they have not become smaller - they are still quite large devices due to the principle. The small EVIL systems, on the other hand, save a lot of space just by the missing mirror box. And this applies not only to the housing - optics can often be built more compact with the same image circle if the distance to the chip plane is smaller. And then the possibility of adaptation! I can adapt almost everything on my NEX-3 that I still have lying around at home in terms of old optics. Very pleasant, because even the optics of my old Contax RTS III were significantly more compact than current DSLR lenses, and if I want to be really compact, I can put the Leica lenses on it.
What has changed for me as a result: I have the reflex "throw the camera in the backpack" much more often than before - the NEX-3 was not expensive, so you don't think much about the transport, in the backpack and good. It doesn't produce much weight with the standard zoom and you have almost everything you need. The image quality itself always surprises me - and in a positive way. I hardly believe that my 10D was really better (on the contrary, the sufficient quality up to 3200 ISO on the NEX makes shots possible that I would not have even thought about before). And the focus-peek on the NEX is better with manual lenses than the focusing aids of old manual SLRs (at least with my eye values).
All in all, the investment in an EVIL system (ok, in my case actually in two systems, since I also have the Panasonic equipment) was a real gain. Even if most of my photo friends would probably wrinkle their noses at the family photos and pure snapshots that I take - hey, I'm getting married soon, I have to get used to family pictures, the time of wild art experiments (which were not really better) is over.
In the end, only one thing is important to me: that photography is fun for me. And that is the case again with the new compact cameras. And what more do you want.