"These are great pictures, you must have a great camera!"
Caveat: You can take great pictures with a camera-phone but you can't take every type of shot.
I think any DSLR with a good choice of glass (lenses) would be able to reproduce most of these shots. More expensive camera bodies are only slightly better in the optical sense but are MUCH better constructed.
Framing, aperture selection and patience plays a bigger part. Most photographers take a prolific amount of pictures, expect to only keep about 1-10% of the shots you take.
Most photographers take a prolific amount of pictures
Digital cameras are a wonderful thing!
A good mirrorless could take most of these shots as well, though I suspect by the time you installed a lens long enough for the wildlife shots[1], it wouldn't be much lighter than the DSLR.
1 - I didn't check the EXIF data, but assume he was using at least 200mm, probably longer, for those shots.
>A good mirrorless could take most of these shots as well, though I suspect by the time you installed a lens long enough for the wildlife shots[1], it wouldn't be much lighter than the DSLR.
That's one of the big advantages of Micro Four-Thirds - if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of sensor area, you get very bright and lightweight telephoto lenses.
Why stop there? With a Pentax Q, your standard 135mm telephoto becomes a 756mm-equivalent super-tele! Your 200mm becomes an 1120mm-equivalent! With just a 400mm you can take photos of the moon that will fill the whole frame[0]!
On the other hand - with a smaller sensor you get worse low-light performance, increased noise, poorer resolution, a greater difficulty with diffraction limit degrading your resolution[1], and decreased ability to isolate a subject. In technical terms, bigger sensors are where it's at.
It's certainly true that smaller sensors let you get more reach out of a piece of glass - but it's always funny that M4/3 is raised as the "ideal" format for doing this somehow, as if APS-C is not already smaller than full frame, or that there do not exist even smaller sensors which can give you even more reach.
Mirrorless bodies like the NEX system that let you cram big sensors into a small body size are definitely one of the more interesting developments recently. Especially the Fuji/Hasselblad collaboration that puts a digital medium-format sensor into a MILC body. The Fuji X-series are very interesting and well-designed cameras and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.
When I go on vacation I take an Olympus XA and a Fuji GS 645 folding camera for a nice combination of fields-of-view in a compact size. But at this point I'm really ogling the Fuji X-series...
It's a question of balancing the tradeoffs of sensor size. For most photographers, the sweet spot is somewhere between APS-C and full frame. M4/3 isn't the ideal format, but it's a useful format.
The Olympus E-M1 MkII is fairly competitive with APS-C sensors, but you get significantly more reach. For most photographers, that extra reach is neither here nor there. The extra depth of field of a smaller sensor is more hindrance than help in a lot of cases. If you're a wildlife photographer who normally shoots with very long lenses, it's a compelling advantage.
While the lens would be lighter than a DSLR equivalent, I still can't bring myself to buy one for my Olympus set-up.
The reason I sold my Canon gear and went MFT was the size - it's almost pocketable and easily fits in a small backpack when travelling. Adding even a moderate telephoto ruins it for me.
The focal ranges are more intended for APS-C, but do check out the Sigma 19/2.8 and 30/2.8 lenses. They are not quite a pancake lens, but they are pretty close.
Are you OK with manual glass? If so, check out the Samyang 135mm f/2. If that's still too big, the Pentax 135mm f/2.5 or Nikkor 105/2.5 are both quite compact (roughly the size of a can of soda) and will provide you with a little more reach. None of those is a native M4/3 lens, so you will need to buy them in a Nikon or Pentax mount and use an adapter.
The biggest question to my mind, when it comes to camera shootouts, is how close could you get to this kind of quality with a superzoom?
Take a Canon SX60, having a lens that's 21-1365mm (sic) 35 mm equivalent. Admittedly the sensor is much worse, etc., but this covers most of that 6 lens range (apart from wide apertures at high tele).
Somewhat anecdotal evidence, but I was on safari with a guy who had a superzoom camera (can't remember which sorry but it went to 1200mm or so). He was mocking the size of my full frame DSLR + 800mm Canon prime, saying he had far more reach with his almost pocketable camera - which was of course true. I was curious to see what the difference was in practice so we both took photos of a waterbuck in the distance (him at both 800mm and 1200mm). Comparing them later on a laptop PC the difference was truly night and day, MUCH more significant than I was expecting. Every single hair was razor sharp in my photo while his just showed a mottled "mush" with very little detail at all due to poor optical resolution combined with overly strong noise reduction (the latter of which could at least be partly addressed by shooting RAW).
I have a superzoom myself, and I'm not surprised at this. I guess you saw not just the difference in optical resolution, but particularly in hazy conditions, that the much larger front aperture on your 800mm prime means is "averaging out" blur from haze and air motion to a much greater extent, giving in total a much higher clarity.
In the middle of a hot summer day, the 800mm end on my superzoom is near-useless, but at or after sunset it's much better. Still very noticeable difference from your 800mm prime, I guess, but less so than at midday.
Pixel peepers will find differences. But, for sharing photos on the web, a good superzoom will do well enough for most people.
The biggest differences are going to be low light conditions and controlling depth of field (portraits, etc). Also, motion (sports, wildlife), where the ability to easily focus manually ahead of time can make a huge difference.
Most of my photo-hobbyist friends (myself included) have moved away from DSLR to one of the mirrorless systems. I use MFT, and quite a few use Fuji X.
"These are great pictures, you must have a great camera!"
Caveat: You can take great pictures with a camera-phone but you can't take every type of shot.
I think any DSLR with a good choice of glass (lenses) would be able to reproduce most of these shots. More expensive camera bodies are only slightly better in the optical sense but are MUCH better constructed.
Framing, aperture selection and patience plays a bigger part. Most photographers take a prolific amount of pictures, expect to only keep about 1-10% of the shots you take.