Sans Mirror  

Short answer: doing justice to an entire industry simply outpaced my ability to cover it thoroughly. 

The sansmirror site was first published separately in 2011—it had been a section of my main site beginning in 2009—after I had used m4/3 mirrorless cameras in my photography work for two years and realized that mirrorless was going to be a dominant driver of the camera market and thus needed a home of its own. Over the following decade, I expanded the site to its current form, where it covered the entire mirrorless camera marketplace in a way no other Web property did.

Unfortunately, as I age—I'm 73 as I write this—keeping up with an entire industry while continuing to teach workshops, photograph for a few remaining clients, and writing books just wasn't going to happen. Thus, I've made the decision to simplify what I do into basically: (a) cover photography (bythom.com), and (b) cover Nikon Z System mirrorless cameras and lenses (zsystemuser.com). 

Why Nikon? Because they've been my primary gear provider for decades now. For my sansmirror work I was carrying Canon, Fujifilm, Olympus, Sony, or other gear alongside my primary Nikon choices, which allowed me to make clear and educated statements about how various models compared. However, the process of acquiring, learning, testing, and then using for professional photography work all these cameras and lenses from multiple vendors became too much of a task for me to do on my own, thus my decision to discontinue sansmirror. 

You can continue to use the resources on this site. I'm committed to keeping the server going for at least another year, probably more, so that the plethora of information I've built doesn't get lost. I've removed the ads and affiliate links (at least as many as I could find in a pass through the over two thousand pages of this site), as well as all tracking mechanisms. I've also cleaned up the structure slightly and removed a few articles that would be misleading in current context (i.e., they needed to be updated). News articles back through 2013 are still available, as well.

Thank you to those who supported this site, including sansmirror's exclusive advertiser for its entire history, B&H. Without your support all this information and advice would have never accumulated in the first place.

Sincerely,

Thom

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A few notes on my last site edit at the end of 2025:

• In the reviews I've left links to manufacturer's sites that may now be orphaned; technically, inbound links that are no longer valid should be dealt with by the camera maker either with 301 redirects or 404 errors. I've left older links partly to show people just how fast the camera makers and others are abandoning their own marketing and data pages.
• You might note that in reviews I sometimes make Recommended conclusions at the end. These also all include the year(s) in which that recommendation was active. As new products came onto the market, previously recommended products often got their recommendations dropped because there was a better choice.
• My Nikon 1 and Sony Alpha books have now been retired. Most of them covered cameras no longer sold or recommended, and keeping these up-to-date and at the quality level I seek out means that other projects wouldn't get my full attention.
• Every page on this site was at least looked at, if not cleaned up. Pages that were modified and/or had advertising links removed now have a newer last modification date at the bottom. 

Because the news articles begin to get buried deep in the menu item, I’ve promoted them into separate yearly or semi-yearly folders for awhile. If you’re looking for the current year’s news, just click on News/Views in the menus at the top of the page (i.e. don’t use the pull down menu). 

Here are the stories that appeared on this site in 2023 and 2024 (for stories from 2011 to 2020, click here, for stories from 2021 to 2022 click here):