Sigma Fixed a Lot With the fp II, but Is It Enough?

At $2,199 for the body alone, plus roughly $500 more if you want the optional electronic viewfinder, the Sigma fp II asks a lot for a camera with no mechanical shutter and no in-body stabilization. Sigma bills it as the world's smallest full frame camera, and if you carry a camera all day through crowded streets or up a mountainside, that size decides how often the camera leaves the bag at all.

Christopher Frost took the Sigma fp II to Iceland and set it beside the original Sigma fp to see how far the design has come. The list of changes is long: a much faster sensor, a far larger battery, 70 GB of internal storage alongside the SD card slot, a full-size HDMI port, a screen that finally tilts up and down, and noticeably quicker menus. The sensor speed reaches furthest. Without a mechanical shutter, both the fp and the Sigma fp L showed heavy rolling shutter in stills whenever the camera moved fast, and Frost's side-by-side clips show the fp II's partially stacked sensor leaving that problem well behind. A little tilt in vertical lines still shows up on very quick pans, though it compares well against plenty of other cameras he has tested.

The battery is the same model Panasonic uses in its full-size Lumix bodies. Sigma's rating works out to roughly 400 stills or a bit over an hour of video, and in cold Icelandic weather Frost got about 1,500 photos plus some footage from just two batteries, a dramatic change from the original fp's poor endurance. The internal storage is fast, though not fast enough for raw video, and at the time of the review, you can't record to internal memory and the SD card simultaneously. A glass protector sits in front of the sensor, which makes cleaning simple. The rubber HDMI cover is now attached to the body instead of being a loose piece waiting to get lost. There's still no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, so getting files onto your phone means plugging in a cable.

Electronic-only shutters have moved from oddity to mainstream over the last few years. Nikon dropped the mechanical shutter entirely on the Nikon Z9 and Nikon Z8, relying on fast stacked sensors, and it used a partially stacked design in the Nikon Z6III to cut readout time without the cost of a fully stacked chip. Faster readout reduces skew, but it can't remove banding from lights that pulse with the power supply. In the U.S., electricity runs at 60 Hz, so many lights flicker 120 times per second, and shutter speeds of 1/120 s or 1/60 s usually keep bands out of the frame. In countries on 50 Hz power, 1/100 s and 1/50 s do the same job. Cheap LEDs can flicker at other frequencies entirely, so if you shoot indoors with any electronic shutter body, fire off a few test frames under the venue's actual lighting before the moment you care about arrives.

Video is where the fp II packs in the most. It records 6K open gate internally, and 4K open gate gives you room to cut horizontal and vertical versions from one clip. You get true 24p, zebras, a waveform, focus peaking, exposure control by shutter angle, de-squeeze display for anamorphic lenses, a time-lapse mode, and raw video when you connect an external recorder. Tally lamps on the front and top confirm you're actually recording. The missing in-body stabilization hurts most here, since the only help is a basic digital mode, and Frost's handheld test footage still showed plenty of vibration. He also runs the 6K and several 4K modes through an ISO ladder to find where noise starts to intrude, and the results are more consistent across settings than you might expect.

In the hand, the camera is solid but not comfortable, and the small buttons can feel fiddly. The tiny body leaves room for few controls, so you'll visit the quick menu often for ISO and other settings, steering with both the top and rear dials. Stills run up to 20 fps with continuous autofocus, and the electronic shutter tops out at 1/25,600 s. The color modes have been trimmed to match the Sigma BF, dropping the old options and adding looks like powder blue, warm gold, and teal and orange, each with adjustable strength, shadow fade, and vignetting. Autofocus now tracks humans and animals, making it Sigma's most capable system so far. It tracked well for Frost, if not as smoothly as the best systems, though in video he saw focus wobble now and then on still scenes and suggests single-shot autofocus there.

Frost's raw-versus-JPEG comparison is in the video above.