Review: Sigma BF Camera

Sigma has a long history of releasing, let's call them, eccentric cameras. Last year, the brand put out the BF, which continues in that tradition. Because it is very different, lacking features like a mechanical shutter, viewfinder, and storage-card slot, among others, I wanted to spend some extra time with it before passing judgment. After using it for months, I've decided that the Sigma BF is the perfect camera for people who love using cameras more than they enjoy taking photographs.

I don't mean that as a slight necessarily—I think it's fine to love the tool without paying mind to the fruits of its labor. I have an entire collection of antique hand planes I very rarely use, but they look really nice on display. I get it. This design approach does have consequences though, and one big one is that the Sigma BF can be frustrating when you're trying to actually take pictures.

Beautiful Foolishness

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

The Sigma BF takes its name from the phrase “beautiful foolishness,” which Sigma pulled from a poem in The Book of Tea. I mention this because its name neatly sets the stage for what the Sigma BF aims to accomplish. The camera is not trying to compete with high-end, full-frame cameras from Sony, Canon, Nikon, or any other legacy maker. In fact, Sigma seems to have known that it couldn't face off against those heavy hitters, so it built its own playing field. The success or failure of the BF ultimately depends entirely on you and whether you fit on Sigma's beautiful field of (potentially) foolishness.

Let's start with the basics—the dirt on the field, as it were. The design choices here are all about the aesthetics of the camera, not how it works. I could argue about whether that's good or bad, but either way, it's important to know before you consider buying one.

In my 15 years of reviewing cameras, I've always refused to use the phrase "feels good in the hand," but, well, I'm going to come very close right now because I think it's important to say that the Sigma BF feels very bad in the hand. Bad enough that no one in the design process could have missed it. The body is a single piece of machined aluminum—a beautiful metal box with no concessions whatsoever to pedestrian concerns like ergonomics. It's awkward to hold, no matter how you try to do it. A one-handed grip feels downright dangerous; using two hands works, but the BF still feels clunky and sharp. Because, well, it is.

The simple truth is, this camera is unpleasant to hold for long periods of time. You could get around this with a third-party grip, but then you lose the aesthetic appeal, and at that point, you're going against the spirit of the thing.

The BF features a 24 megapixel full-frame sensor in a very blockish, extremely minimalist body. The body is lightweight and available in either black or silver. It takes L-mount lenses. Sigma provided me with a 35 f/2 DG lens, along with a 90 f/2.8 DG. I primarily shot with the 35, which weighs roughly the same as the body and feels pretty well-balanced. I'd be curious to try the Sigma 45 f/2.8 DG ($619), which is marginally smaller and lighter and might feel better on the BF body. Even better than that would be some pancake lenses, but so far, Sigma has not made any for this body.

After months of shooting with it, I don't mind that it's chunky and awkward to hold. The only thing in the overly designed body that bothers me is that there's only a strap anchor, which means you're limited to using wrist straps exclusively. I find this odd, simply because it seems like at least one market for the BF is the person who likes to have an aesthetically pleasing camera hanging around their neck, which isn't possible here. There may be some straps out there that would let it hang vertically, with both sides of the strap on the single anchor point, but none of the straps I tried worked this way; the anchor point was too small to get both sides of a strap attached.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Despite it being awkward to hold and attach to yourself, I like the overall design of the camera's body. I like the button layout, which consists of four buttons and a toggle wheel. I also like that only one button is an actual physical button, and the rest are haptic. The menu and control system are well-designed and functional, and I found the little electronic window that displays pertinent info depending on what you're doing (battery life, f-stop, shutter speed, etc) to be really nice.

The downside of the camera's minimalism is that it's, frankly, cumbersome in fully manual mode. The lack of dials means adjusting shutter speeds, and ISO requires going into the menus using the touchscreen. After a few days of doing this, I realized that the Sigma BF may be full-frame, but for practical use, it's very much a point-and-shoot camera. I got all my best shots in what I'd call aperture priority mode, with ISO and shutter set to auto, as I controlled the aperture via the lens.

The image quality is excellent. The 24-megapixel sensor is very sharp, and while it might be nice to have something more like 36 megapixels for better cropping capability, I never felt limited by the sensor. I primarily shot RAW images and came to really enjoy Sigma's color rendering, which yields a distinctive, cool-skewing tone. Sigma does have some film simulations you can use to emulate different looks when shooting JPG, but I didn't use them much beyond testing. I also found these more interesting when shooting video than stills.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Surprisingly for a camera that feels very much like a point-and-shoot, the BF is capable of really nice video. The specs aren't top of the line, but it can shoot 6K L-log, which I found has a wonderful, slightly noisy look to it that gives it filmlike quality when color-graded in post. I like it more than what you get with most cameras these days, with an overly sharpened and almost clinical appearance, but that's a matter of personal taste.

The high quality of the autofocus system also impressed me. While it wouldn't be my top pick for shooting sports, the autofocus is plenty speedy, and eye-detect nearly always worked. It did miss focus every now and then when shooting at its top speed (8 frames per second), but it was no worse than Fujifilm's X100VI autofocus.

Missing Parts

Sigma purposefully left out a bunch of features you'd typically expect in cameras of this league. There's no mechanical shutter, no viewfinder, no storage-card slots, no in-body image stabilization (IBIS), no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to connect to other devices, no hot shoe (or cold shoe), and no mic or headphone jacks.

Of these notable omissions, the most serious is the mechanical shutter. Rolling shutter, where the scene is recorded progressively, rather than all at once as a mechanical shutter does, produces distortions of fast-moving objects, along with other effects. There's no way around this. The BF will have distortion and banding (horizontal bands of light and dark caused by the sensor recording the flickering of artificial lights) in many common shooting situations. Try snapping a shot of a train, a kid hitting a baseball, or anything under artificial lights, and you'll for sure see distortion and banding in your photos. It's not necessarily the end of the world, but it does impose some limitations you won't find in most comparable cameras on the market. It's also something you're not likely to notice on location because the rear screen isn't great (more on that below).

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

The rest of these omissions are not such a big deal to me. Would it be nice to have in-body image stabilization (IBIS)? Sure, but I've shot plenty of cameras without it. Not having IBIS is a limitation to be aware of, but not a constraint you can't work around (as opposed to no mechanical shutter). Fall back to the old rule of keeping your shutter speeds above the focal length of your lens, and you won't have issues with the missing IBIS.

Then there's the missing removable storage. Yes, I'd prefer a card; it's just easier to swap out a card in the field. But the BF does have 256 gigabytes of built-in storage. I can't think of the last time I shot enough images to fill that much space before getting back to my laptop to download them. Which is to say that 256-gigabytes of storage is plenty for the nonprofessional photographer.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

The main deal-breaker for me is the lack of a viewfinder. I still prefer to shoot through a viewfinder. It's just muscle memory—hand me a camera, and I will bring it to my eye. If you love a viewfinder, too, this is not the camera for you.

Another problem with the lack of a viewfinder is that the rear screen is nearly unusable in bright sunlight. It's just too dark to compose accurately. The rear screen also doesn't tilt or move at all, which means if you like to shoot from the hip, you won't be able to use it at all. If you want to get an unusual angle, say from the ground, be prepared to lie down to frame it.

You can crank up the screen brightness all the way, which helps a little when you're in the sun, but it's still difficult to use in bright daylight. Having the screen brightness all the way up also chews through the already paltry battery life. Sigma claims the BF can shoot about 260 images on a single charge, but that drops significantly if you have to crank up the screen in bright daylight. I was finding that in bright sun, I seldom got more than two to three hours of shooting time on a single charge.

Should You Buy It?

It might sound like the Sigma BF has some serious limitations, and it does, especially when you compare the specs to other cameras in the BF's $2,200 price range. However, limitations can be a good thing. Without limitations, you have nothing to build from. This is not a camera for the "spray and pray" style of shooting. This camera requires some thought to use well. It requires keeping in mind its limitations and working within them. If you do that, the BF is capable of making great images.

While I do not recommend the Sigma BF for most people, there are no doubt photographers out there who will love it not despite quirky design choices, but because of them. I fully expect this to be one of those cameras that develops a cult following in 20 years.

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