Spend my bosses money!

Thumpermawer

My boss has responsibility for a small departmental communications team, and they want to buy a camera to capture images of #boringcorporatestuff (headshots, groups of people, coventions - vast majority indoors in frequently poor lighting).

I’ve been asked to come up with some suggestions for a camera that fits the bill, ideally for less than £1,000.

The size of the camera isn’t important, but it will be used by people who will have basic knowledge (meaning using ext flash is out of the question). I’m leaning towards a crop canon dslr (2000D) with ef-s 17-55 f2.8. It will do well in poor light, I will be able to set it up to give nice jpegs sooc, and easy for me to troubleshoot whenever they run into problems as I use Canon.  

I haven’t been keeping up with other options recently, is there something better? What would you buy? Rx100?

snerkler

If it’s going to be used by ‘novices’ I’d recommend going mirrorless so that the LCD can be used easily.

Sony a6xxx series would be a good choice, as would Fuji.

Atavus

I’d look at the RX100. Perhaps avoid the Mk6 and get the larger aperture instead of a bit more reach at the long end of the zoom.

snerkler

Not going to be ideal for indoor shooting in poor light tbh, that's why I didn't suggest M4/3. As much as I rate M4/3 it might not be best for poor light.

newbie1

Does your boss expect better results than people will get with their smartphones?

If you have people interested and willing to learn to use the new camera then ok, if not then if it was me I’d save the budget and let them use their own cameras or pay someone to do a proper job when necessary.

shotokan101

BTW why is flash a "No-No" ?

snerkler

OP said it was due to the lack of expertise from the potential users

TBH having flash on TTL with camera in auto shouldn’t require any knowledge, even better if you left the flash pointing upwards (ie bounced). Can imagine you’d go through a lot of batteries though, and if the user didn’t realise the flash wasn’t working you’d potentially end up with a lot of unusable images.

Thumpermawer

Thanks for the advice everyone.

I don’t have an interesting update, but it’s poor to ask for advice and not follow up soooo...

Using camera phones and occasional pro isn’t suitable here, services required too often, with the need to now and then crop in for images of speakers during events when not easy to get close (and another reason why flash isn’t desirable, as much as I think it would be the best solution!).

Mirror less giving wysiwyg is a benefit I hadn’t considered. I’m going to use this as an excuse to take them camera shopping to try out a few crop sensor bodies (Sony a6xxx, Canikon dslrs, Fuji) to see what they prefer, then look at costs of adding a bright zoom.