Today the photographic equipment market is distinguished by a variety of models for every taste and price category. The class of semi-professional cameras is of constant interest among novice photographers. How exactly do they differ from amateur and professional ones - apart from the price, of course, and how much?
Customization features
At first glance, the most noticeable difference between a semi-professional camera and a professional one is that it has ready-made scene settings, which are familiar to owners of amateur cameras. For example: a mode for night, winter, shooting, shooting children and pets, and so on. In these modes, there are automatically set parameters that are optimal for a particular situation. Owners of professional cameras set all these settings on their own, due to their experience and intuition. Are you ready to master the intricacies of manual tuning, or would you rather use the automatic ones?
Specifications
Another important distinguishing parameter is the size of the photosensitive matrix. For semi-professional cameras, it is one and a half times less than for professional ones, and therefore the quality of their photos is worse, especially if the photo was taken in low light. As a result, with such a matrix, professional lenses can be used, but their potential will be realized at best by half. Although in any case, the pictures will be better than using a semi-professional lens.
The so-called "shutter resource" is also important. With any camera, the shutter is designed for an approximately predetermined number of actuations. After reaching this resource, the shutter starts to malfunction, which makes the work of the photographer extremely difficult. Professional cameras have a higher resource than semi-professional cameras, and even more so, amateur ones. This is not surprising - after all, photographers have to take a very large number of pictures in a short time. Professional cameras generally have a large margin of safety and resistance to damage. For example, they have a self-cleaning system from dust, which is very useful - after all, dust getting into the camera mechanism causes a deterioration in the quality of frames.
Picture format
Another difference is the format in which pictures are saved to the memory card. For professional cameras, these are non-compression formats, such as TIFF or BMP. These formats take up more space on the memory card, but they save information better. An experienced photographer will independently process the images and save them in the desired size, format and resolution for photo printing. Semi-professional cameras, for the most part, save images in an already compressed JPEG format. Such pictures are lighter, take up less space on the card, and are copied to a computer faster, but they are of inferior quality.
As a result, we can conclude that professional cameras give better image quality and allow you to set finer settings, as well as change lenses as needed. But this is a rather complicated and expensive technique. If you are not planning to do photography as your main profession, you should think carefully before purchasing a professional camera. It may be better to start with a semi-professional.
