In February, Sigma announced the Sigma BF. It’s a complete, interchangeable lens camera with only a shutter release, a dial and three buttons. This minimalism speaks to me and I think BF is potentially transformative. Photography is one of my favorite hobbies, and I always think modern cameras are too complicated. When I received a unit from Sigma BF for testing, I wanted to like it. Unfortunately, this may be too simple.
It all starts with design. Sigma BF is one of the few single-piece cameras in the industry. It was carved out of a piece of aluminum, Sigma said, and it said it would take seven hours to complete. The result is a different camera than any I’ve used before, with a build quality that outperforms my current fujifilm model, namely the X-E3 and X-S20. Now, I know what you’re thinking: BF looks like an ergonomic nightmare. Surprisingly, this is not bad, thanks to the two beveled edges, your hands on the bottom of the camera.
Still, it lacks some features that may make the limitations of its one-piece design more comfortable. First, proper grip will be great, especially if you use a 50mm-weight lens like the Sigma, send me to test it. The BF also lacks a hot shoe bracket, so the third-party thumb grip is not on the table. The most annoying thing is that it only has a single eyelet, so if you don’t want to use a neck strap, you need a tripod that attaches to the camera. I don’t have one of them, so I had to hold a $2,000 bf in my hand throughout my use of it. You can imagine how that feels.
The BF offers a completely different shooting experience from a typical digital camera. As I mentioned, it has only one shutter release, one dialing and three buttons (one for turning the camera on and off, one for viewing your photos and videos, and one for accessing the overflow menu). There is also a touch screen, but you don’t know it at the beginning because there isn’t much use when shooting except to select focus and toggle some options.
One of the watch faces of the BF is the main way to interact with the camera. To adjust the exposure, you first press left or right on the dial to loop to a specific setting, and then adjust the level as needed. A second smaller screen above the dial allows you to adjust these parameters without interacting with the main monitor.
Additionally, you can press the center of the watch face to open the BF’s “Double-layer” menu system. As the name suggests, Sigma organizes most of the things you need in a menu of two levels. For example, suppose you want to switch the camera from matrix to field metrology. This involves pressing the dial, scrolling to one of an exposure settings, tapping the center of the dial again, then pressing the touch screen with your thumb and enabling dot metering. Accessing most of the settings you need won’t be that tedious, but this worst-case scenario shows a lack of experience in shooting with Sigma BF.
BF is not suitable for capturing short moments. Modern cameras are known for being when abandoning most physical controls, and the Sigma BF makes it difficult to change multiple settings at the same time. Whenever I want to shoot a fast moving scene, I get the most annoyed with my boyfriend.
While walking with Sigma BF in one of my pictures, I saw a father and son riding a bicycle in the seat behind him. Using my X-E3 or almost any other camera, capturing that moment will be simple. I could have been independent of each other’s drive mode, focus system and shutter speed. On BF, I have to adjust each setting continuously. By the time I finished it, my father and son were gone forever.
If Sigma allows you to at least edit the quick settings screen to show fewer options, you can solve some of the disadvantages of BF. For example, I don’t need to change things like that easily. In 2025, each new camera comes with an overly bloated menu system, and in this respect, the Sigma BF is the breath of fresh air. However, allowing users to make their own adjustments will give you a better experience.
That’s it: Using BF, Sigma breaks the camera interface convention, which is a convention with good reason. Let me give you one of the more frustrating examples: The inexplicable camera does not provide an easy way to measure the exposure of a scene. There is no meter to indicate whether I want to shoot under or overexpress, and I can’t add one to the home screen.
The only way I can see the histogram, i.e. my DingTalk’s preferred method, is to access the second layer of the interface from one of the capture settings. This is a particularly confusing decision as you can press the shutter halfway to make quick exposure compensation adjustments via the control dial, but once you do, the BF will pop out of any menu you look at. If mining menus are not your business, there are two live view overlays that you can see if you cut the shadows or highlights. First is your usual zebra mode. The second Sigma called the fake color becomes most screen grayscale and uses warning colors. Neither as accurate as a proper exposure table or histogram.
On paper, the BF is a decent camera for video and supports 6K recording, HEVC encoding and L-LOG. Unfortunately, BF’s minimalism is also a weakness here. First, composition is a challenge because the camera has a fixed screen. Getting available lenses is also tricky. The BF does not offer internal image stabilization, and although there are some built-in stable L-shaped lenses, most people have nothing to do with the BF due to their size and weight.
If you’ve gone this far, you might be wondering if I have something to say about BF. Well, the best thing about the camera is that it really needs really great photos, which is what makes all the shortcomings even more frustrating. The 24-megapixel backlight sensor and Sigma’s lens capture and present details without clinical need. The BF also has excellent theme detection autofocus, making portraits of people and pets easy.
The Sigma BF has some interesting ideas about how the 2025 camera looks, but these ideas are often compromised by poor execution. As the first stab of a minimalist camera, the BF can do enough power, and through the exquisiteness, I can see that future versions are developing into something special. For example, I would love to see Sigma find a way to include flipped screens in BF’s all-in-one frame. Before that, $2,000 is asking for more cameras.
