Quite possibly the most basic gear you can get for shooting nice portraits is a 50mm lens on a crop body camera. This combination of fast prime and smaller sensor creates almost the ideal conditions for this type of photography. So, how do some of the options in the field stack up?
Photographers Vanessa Joy and Caroline Tran pit the Canon EOS R10 and the RF version of the nifty fifty, the Canon RF 50mm f/1.8 STM lens against the decidedly more upmarket Fujifilm X-H2S and high-end Fujifim XF 50mm f/1.0 R WR lens. The Fuji lens alone costs more than the entire Canon setup, which rings in at $1,079 versus $2,499 for the X-H2S and $1,499 for the lens.
Neither of these cameras are slouches. The R10 has pretty much everything the higher-end cameras in the R lineup have. I frequently switch between an R5/R6, and it doesn't feel like I'm ever missing a beat, as the controls, features, and autofocus performance are roughly equivalent. Certainly, the image quality doesn't come as close to the full frame cameras, but as Joy shows in this shootout, it's not about the sensor size, it's about how you use it.
The X-H2S is the apex of Fuji's APS-C X-series lineup, and on a technical level, it's also a crop-sensor camera but with a fancy X-trans sensor, slightly more resolution in both stills and video vs. the R10, and faster shooting in general. That said, for portraits, much of this doesn't matter (though for Tran's jumping portraits, that 40 fps burst vs. the Canon's 23 might come into play a little bit when grabbing just the perfect moment). There's also the niceties of a higher-resolution viewfinder, a bigger battery, and dual card slots, but we are talking almost four times the money here.
With a little over a day under its belt, commenters seem to be leaning towards Joy's take on things, even with the "budget" R10 and nifty fifty. If you watch the video above, you can cruise on over to the comments section on YouTube and cast your vote for the best photos. Both photographers did an excellent job with just a crop sensor and a 50mm lens, though.
