In February, Sigma announced the Sigma BF. It is an interchangeable lens camera complete with just a trigger, a dial and three buttons. This minimalism speaks to me and I felt that the BF was potentially transformer. Photography is one of my favorite hobbies, and I have always felt that modern cameras are too complicated. When I received a Sigma BF unit to test, I wanted to love it. Unfortunately, it could be too simple.
It all starts with the design. The Sigma BF is one of the rare single -of -industry cameras. It is sculpted from a single aluminum slab, a process that Sigma dit takes seven hours. The result is a camera unlike all those I used before, with a quality of construction that exceeds one of my current Fujifilm models, X-E3 and X-S20. Now I know what you think: the BF looks like an ergonomic nightmare. Surprisingly, it is not too bad, thanks to the inclusion of two bevelled edges where your hands meet the lower body of the camera.
However, there are a few features that would have made more comfortable to use, probably because of the limits of its monohull design. On the one hand, a good plug would have been good, especially when you use a 50 mm heavy lens like the one Sigma sent me for the tests. The BF also lacks a hot shoe support, so third -party thumb handles are out of the table. The most boring of everyone, it has only one strap eyelet, so if you do not want to use a neck strap, you will need it which is attached to the tripod support of the camera. I don’t have one, so I had to transport the $ 2,000 BF in my hand all the time I used it. You can imagine what it felt.
The BF offers a very different shooting experience from your typical digital camera. As I mentioned, it has only one trigger, only one dial and three buttons (one to power the camera on and deactivated, one to examine your photos and sequences and one to access the overflow menu). There is also a touch screen, but you will not know at the beginning, because apart from the selection of a point of development and the implementation of certain options, you will not use it much during the shooting.
The BF dial is the main way to interact with the camera. To adjust your exposure, you first press left or right on the dial to cycle at a specific parameter, then run it to modify the levels as you wish. A second smaller screen above the dial allows you to adjust these settings without interacting with the main screen.
Alternatively, you can press the dial center to open the “Dual Layer” menu system of the BF. As its name suggests, Sigma has organized most of what you might need through two levels of menu. For example, let’s say you want to pass the matrix’s camera to the spot measurement. This consists in pressing the dial, scrolling through one of the exhibition settings, again pressing the center of the dial, then using your thumb to press the touch screen and activate the sanded measure. Accessing most of the parameters you will need will not be as tedious, but this worst scenario shows where the experience of shooting with the Sigma BF is absent.
The boyfriend is not ideal for capturing fleeting moments. By abandoning most of the physical commands, modern cameras are known, the Sigma BF makes it difficult to modify several parameters simultaneously. I was very bored by the boyfriend every time I wanted to shoot a quick scene.
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On one of my photos with the Sigma BF, I saw a father to bike with his son in the siege behind him. With my X-E3 or almost any other camera, the capture of this moment would have been simple. I could have changed the training mode, the focus system and the shutter speed independently of each other. On the BF, I had to adjust each adjustment consecutively. As I finished, the father and the son had left for a long time.
Some of the BF gaps could be treated if Sigma allowed you at least to modify the screen of the quick parameters to display fewer options. I don’t need easy access to change things like aspect relationship, for example. In 2025, each new camera was shipped with an overly inflated menu system, and in this regard, the Sigma BF is a breath of fresh air. However, allowing the user to make their own adjustments would have made a much better experience.
And that’s the thing: with the BF, Sigma breaks the interface conventions of the camera which are conventions for a good reason. Let me give you one of the most frustrating examples: the camera does not inexplicably offer an easy way to measure the exhibition of a scene. There was no counter to indicate if I was about to underestimate or over-emit a blow, and I could not add one to the main screen.
The only way to see a histogram, my favorite method to nail the exhibition, was to access the second layer of the interface from one of the capture parameters. This is a particularly confusing decision because you can half press the shutter to make quick exposure compensation adjustments with the control dial, but as soon as you do, the BF jumps from the menu you are looking for. If digging in the menus is not your thing, there are two superimpositions of live view that you can allow you to see if you have cut your shadows or your reflections. The first is your usual zebra model. The second, which Sigma calls for false color, transforms the major part of the gray screen and uses warning colors. Neither of them felt as precise as an appropriate exposure counter or a histogram.
On paper, the BF is a decent camera for video, with support for 6K recording, HEVC coding and Log-Log. Unfortunately, BF minimalism is also a weakness here. To start, supervising a photo is a challenge because the camera has a fixed screen. It is also difficult to get usable images. The BF does not offer image stabilization in the body, and although there are some L -stabilization objectives with integrated stabilization, most would not be practical to use with the BF because of their size and weight.
If you went so far, you are probably wondering if I have something positive to say about the BF. Well, the best thing about the camera is that you need really great photos, which makes all its shortcomings even more frustrating. The 24 -megapixel and rear lit sensor and the sigma lenses capture and make the details beautifully without being clinical. The BF also has a large subject of subject detection which facilitates portraits of people and pets.
Sigma BF has interesting ideas about what a camera can look like in 2025, but these ideas are often spoiled by bad execution. As a first stab on a minimalist camera, the BF has enough things for that, and with refinement, I could see future versions evolve in something special. For example, I would like to see Sigma find a way to include a rocking screen in the monohull frame of the BF. Until then, $ 2,000 is a lot to ask for a camera that could be much more.
