Name: Sigma BF review: effortless beauty, but flawed
Uploaded: 2025-07-23T16:54:51.000Z
Duration: 11 min 23 s
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Adverbs of degree

You really don't see a lot of cameras that look like this one.

The Sigma BF is a bold and brave take on what a modern camera could look like.

Adverbs of manner

The cold and aggressively minimalistic design with sharp edges even looks uncomfortable to hold.

There's a very small number of buttons here, there's only one dial, there's no viewfinder, there's no flip screen, there's no tilt screen, there's no external storage, there's also no hot shoe, there's not even a link for an additional strap so you can put on a neck strap.

And if any of those things are already making you nervous, then this might not be a camera for you.

But after a few weeks of extensive use, I can tell you that you'd be surprised how the lack of these features actually transforms your day-to-day use for the better.

This design is risky, and it is courageous, and it totally works.

Well, it is a $2000 camera, but a type of camera you won't use on jobs with clients or bring to sporting events or things like that.

It is the sort of camera you pair with your favorite lens and you bring it everywhere.

It is your Leica Q, your Nikon ZF or your X100.

It is ideal for street photography or snapping photos of things that you find interesting.

I don't see myself using this camera in a studio or as a video camera.

It is a high-end point and shoot that gets incredibly good results without overthinking it.

Ergonomically, yes, this is not a very comfortable camera to hold, but also not to the point where it would actually bother me.

At no point during my review was I, I don't know, in pain.

One-handed operation is extremely hard, and the lack of a second strap link is a bit infuriating.

And since we're already talking about the bad stuff, let's just keep going.

Most days I'd have to charge the camera once or twice.

The battery indicator is also shown in percentages, and it cannot be turned off, and it just sort of adds to battery anxiety.

Shortly after leaving the house and going on walks, I'd see that percentage drop and it really made me wish that I had an extra battery on me.

I also wish there was an in-body stabilization here, but this would make an already heavy-ish camera possibly a bit too heavy.

Aside from just sounding silly and fake, it can easily ruin some of your photos under fluorescent lights, too.

Everything else, the screen, the viewfinder, the hot shoe, the lack of external storage, the weatherproofing I can easily live without.

And since there's only a handful of buttons and not a lot of ways to customize them, Sigma had to nail the overall experience of taking photos.

Sigma found incredibly clever solutions here, and one of those is the main dial.

The main dial serves as a replacement for all those missing buttons.

In tandem with the little sub-monitor above it, it works extremely well.

So you press left and right to cycle through options, and then spin the dial to change them.

Anything from white balance, shutter, ISO.

I do wish you could customize which options to skip, because some I don't even use.

I kept shooting in aperture mode, so I really don't need shutter or ISO, but that dial just made this camera incredibly fun to use.

I feel like I was experimenting with aspect ratios and different looks far more often than I would with any other camera.

It made me rediscover my love for 21 by 9 aspect ratio and square photos.

That dial also made me experiment with different straight out of the camera film simulations.

My favorite ones are warm gold, teal and orange, and rich.

I mostly kept using the warm gold one, which won me over with its warm tones, muted reds and just desaturated colors throughout.

The rich simulation gives you slightly darker reds and more teal blues, and teal and orange and brings me back to, I don't know, 2018.

The black and white simulation also has a variety of filters that you traditionally use in black and white photography, and so on.

But sadly, there is no way to create your own custom film simulations right now.

One other neat feature of this dial is that when you're pressing the shutter button halfway through, it turns into exposure compensation dial.

And I just started recording video.  That sound is terrible.

But that way you can easily do some quick exposure changes.

And you might have seen that not all buttons are actually buttons, and there are some neat little tricks that you can do.

So if you're resting your finger on the playback button, it'll show your last photo taken until you lift your finger up again.

It's a neat little way that this camera reminds you of its modern features.

As far as camera's menu system go, this is one of the cleanest ones out there.

Of course, that is helped tremendously by the fact that there simply aren't that many options or customizations to do with this camera in the first place.

But one of the first things you'll notice when you pick up the BF and turn it on is how incredibly fast it is.

You can switch between modes pretty quickly.

Continuous shooting is decent for a full-frame camera.

And accessing your photo library is just as fast.

There's also another little detail that I love about this camera that really tells you everything you need to know about it.

So when reviewing photos, pressing down on the D-pad opens them up in a calendar view.

You can cycle through your photos based on days instead of just being an endless stream of photos.

I might be reading too much into it, but I think it speaks volume about how purposefully this everyday camera design is throughout.

All those photos can be reviewed on a large, bright, and decently sharp 3.2-inch screen.

And all those photos are saved on 230GB of internal SSD.

There's no expandable storage option, as we said, and that got a lot of people angry.

For me, not having external storage becomes a concern in a few ways.

One, you have to be more diligent about backing up your photos, making sure you don't run out of space.

And two, usually if your SD card gets corrupted, it sucks, but you swap out an SD card and that's an easy solution.

If your internal storage fails, now that is a different story.

Especially for a product that might not be very repairable, you could be without a camera for a long time.

I would also understand this decision a little bit better if Sigma had a good smartphone app for photo transfers, but they just don't.

So no app, no SD cards means you can only transfer photos with a physical cable.

But there are some positives to look at here as well.

So, one, you don't have to worry about forgetting an SD card, two, 230GB is pretty decent, and three, built-in storage is what makes this camera feel extremely fast too.

Regardless if you consider this a deal-breaker or not, it's 2025.

I think we can all agree that cameras should just have both internal and expandable storage.

Okay, it is a little bit weird to do a camera review and only now get to talk about image quality.

This camera is equipped with a 24.6MP full-frame back-illuminated sensor.

I had it paired with the 50mm f.2 lens, and that lens works so well with this camera.

The photos are simply sharp and detailed, just like you'd expect from a full-frame camera.

Noise at higher ISO is also handled extremely well, and colors still look lively.

I'm usually manually picking focus points with a joystick, but for the sake of testing, I let the camera kind of decide what to focus on, and it did that extremely well.

I also found autofocus a lot more reliable when taking photos, and not so reliable in video.

I kept drifting and breathing just far too often.

Maybe software fixes that, and maybe it can get fine-tuned a little bit.

Okay, and when it comes to video, it is fine.

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Sigma BF review: effortless beauty, but flawed

incredibly

decent

extremely

genuinely