BF stands for beautiful foolishness, Yamaki says.This is a phrase taken from the book, the very old book — I think probably over a hundred years old — called The Book of Tea by Okakura Tenshin, the Japanese researcher. At that time, he wanted to tell the spirit of the Japanese culture and we have the tea ceremony. And through the tea ceremony, he tried to tell what is the essence of Japanese culture.
In the book he said, let’s enjoy the time and the beautiful foolishness with a cup of tea. So this camera is for daily use. Daily life is full of joy and nice relaxing time which he calls it the beautiful foolishness.Yamaki designed the camera with the intention of making it as easy as possible to use without feeling constrained to older design elements that are, Sigma argues, not necessary and overly complicated.
Jaron Schneider
I’ve seen a number of people praising the design as Apple-esque on various social media, and all I could think was: these must be people who never used anything other than an iPhone to take photos. This camera is nothing more than a smartphone with a lens mount, down to the internal, non-swappable storage – the perfect showcase of form over function.
The Sigma BF lands in an awkward middle ground, where instead of a fun minimalistic camera it ends up being both a worse smartphone (larger and heavier, especially if you attach longer lenses to it, and with extra buttons compared to the primarily touch-based interface on smartphones) and a worse camera than regular mirrorless designs (harder to handle without a grip and with those sharp metal edges, uncomfortable to balance and hold for extensive periods, with less options for accessories).
The thing that most casual photographers don’t realize about camera design is that, despite the internals evolving so much over decades from film to digital sensors and now mirrorless, it’s still entirely feasible to take photos using only the on-camera dials and buttons without ever interacting with a screen (mirrorless cameras are a bit of a departure because the viewfinder is technically a screen, but you can use it passively as the optical viewfinder on a dSLR). I would further say that in most situations it’s faster and more efficient to operate the dials than to fiddle with the touchscreen on the back of the camera. The popularity of retro camera designs is a testament to this; and that may also reflect the desire to have something fundamentally different to a smartphone, which are at this point ubiquitous. The Sigma BF is veering to close to the smartphone esthetic and experience to offer something meaningfully special.
As a side note, I like the idea of internal storage on cameras to alleviate issues with memory cards breaking or misplacing them, and I wish that more companies would experiment with it. Storage space could easily become a bottleneck if you shoot video or in burst mode though, so I would prefer a mixed solution with a card slot and some internal storage, which could be used as automatic backup while shooting.
But perhaps the purpose of this product is not to sell in high numbers or to shake up the camera market, but to make headlines and get people to notice Sigma. The limited production capacity of just nine per day (!) seems to support that – then again, investing millions in specialized equipment for this single niche product doesn’t strike me as a smart business decision, no matter how much you charge for it or gain by increased sales in other product lines.
During a tour of Sigma’s headquarters in Aizu, Japan, the company explained to PetaPixel that it needed to acquire six brand-new machines that are capable of milling the BF camera body from a single aluminum block. These machines work in teams of two over the course of seven hours in order to produce the camera. Therefore, Sigma can only make nine per day — an extremely low level of production.
Jaron Schneider
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