One of the most frequently asked questions, regarding photo equipment, is which brand to get, which is the best, and what to avoid.
To put the obvious thing aside, my knowledge about photographic brands is limited to what I’ve used, and what I’ve seen others use. Of the major brands, I never used Nikon, Hasselblad, Panasonic, Fujifilm, Pentax and Leica. Sure, I technically used a very old Leica from the 1940s to shoot my first roll of film, and I used a Nikon D80 a few times but no, for all intents and purposes I haven’t used those and I don’t know much about them. With Nikon, the reason is that they publicly stated that they will never make a 35mm full frame camera, exactly at the time when I was deciding between Canon and Nikon, so I went with Canon. Of course, Nikon announced a 35mm digital camera soon thereafter, but by that point I completely lost any interest in them, since they were for most intents and purposes identical to Canon, and it’s one of those situations where you need to pick one and stick with it.
My main suggestion would be to see what your intentions are, first. If you want to get something basic to learn photography, get something used and cheap in the category you’re interested in, learn for a while and then you’ll know more about what you want to do. Don’t worry about getting “the right brand” initially, because there’s no reason why you should stay within the same system if you only have one camera and one lens. However, if you are really into it, the best advice is to see what the professionals are using as their bread and butter system, and just get that. Main brands have the greatest availability of new and used equipment, the used marketplace is very active and if it’s a system like Canon EF, that’s producing lenses in the same system since 1987, there will be abundance of high quality used equipment that’s fully compatible. For instance, the earliest Canon EF lenses work great on the new RF bodies with the Canon adapter; there are no compatibility issues. This makes Canon RF an excellent modern system to get into, because the selection of glass is extremely deep. With Sony, the situation is theoretically worse because the adapters for Canon EF glass aren’t fully compatible, but there’s a wide selection of 3rd party modern glass from brands such as Tamron and Sigma, and almost anything else can be adapted to Sony, so the selection of glass is almost endless.
Avoid marginal and new brands. Anything non-mainstream means poor availability of everything, and high prices. Also, avoid “luxury brands”, the ones that should belong in the LVMH group; stuff like Leica, Hasselblad, Zeiss and so on. Have in mind that Schneider-Kreuznach recently had Rokinon/Samyang make lenses for their brand, and “Zeiss” lenses are produced by Cosina and Tamron. Hasselblad had their H series of digital cameras and lenses produced by Fuji, and they have recently been bought by DJI, the Taiwanese drone company. Leica is more-less married to Panasonic. So, yeah, that’s what you would be buying if you’re a sucker for old German and Swedish names from last century. You’d be getting Cosina, Tamron, Fuji or Panasonic.
My logic is that quality is where the money is, and money is in the main stream. The most main-stream companies can afford the greatest budget for development of lenses and cameras, because that’s what people are actually buying. If you think some marginal boutique brand can afford the engineers, equipment and the patents of a Sony or a Canon, you’re kidding yourself. The reason the boutique brands are expensive isn’t because they are better, it’s because they have to be, because they don’t have the economy of scale. You’re not paying for quality, you’re paying for development and manufacturing costs divided by the number of expected sales. Zeiss is literally not making anything Tamron or Cosina couldn’t produce, because guess who’s actually manufacturing their designs. I know people like to delude themselves into loyalty to small brands, thinking it’s a competition between handcrafted gems made by skilled artisans, vs. some nameless faceless corporation, but it doesn’t actually work like this. How it works is that Sony sees that there’s a market, and then just hires the best people in the business, acquires everything relevant from Minolta and Olympus, and then has the budget and the market to produce some of the most wonderful lens designs I’ve ever seen, stuff that merges art, science and the highest optical tech. The lesser companies will just be unable to afford retaining the best optical engineers, so in the end, it’s the big guys who will end up with the nerd artisans designing the most insane glass. Also, you’ll be getting a honest product for a honest price, not marketing bullshit worthy of Rolex or LVMH.
Sure, it adds to the mystique of a lens if it’s branded Zeiss, Leica or Hasselblad, and since photographers create art they want to believe that some unique properties of the glass helped create it, but honestly, a lens is what it is, regardless of the brand. It has objective, scientific and technological properties that can be tested. I don’t even mind lenses being expensive if the price is backed by quality. I just prefer to pay for the quality of the lens, not the quality of some marketing department doing the branding.
Image produced by absolutely nothing fancy.
Also, don’t buy into the bullshit about main stream brands producing confectionary images, that look “artificial” or “plasticky”, while the boutique or “art” brands produce “film-like” or “genuinely artistic” results. It’s complete nonsense. What the main stream brands produce is high quality gear for honest money, and what you’ll do with it, whether it will be plasticky nonsense or genuine art, that’s up to you. Some people say “digital” as if it’s a derogatory thing, and they say “film-like” as if it’s praise, but honestly I’ve seen so much “film-like” ugly trash, and so many absolutely beautiful, artistic digital images, that I don’t even know what they mean by all that bullshit. If you think Michelangelo had super-special artistic hammer and chisel with which he created his sculptures, then you’re an idiot. What cameras and lenses need to be is reliable, well designed and well made. They need to have technical properties required for the desired application. Whether the result is art, that’s up to the photographer.