I’ve been missing photography as a hobby and I don’t really have a good camera for stills. I was content with using my phone for a long time, but I’ve found processing has gotten so much worse the last few years that it’s pretty much undoing any kind of hardware improvements. RAW files look great and I’d be fine just using that, but the experience shooting them on my phone with heat and power drain isn’t enjoyable.

I’ve been thinking of getting a small digital camera, but it’s been so long since I’ve kept up with the landscape so I was wondering if anyone had suggestions of either specific models or general category to look at.

My priorities are:
>Small and lightweight
>Well built, can take some abuse and a little weather
>Convenient charging, ideally just USB-C, I won’t need extra batteries
>Decent controls, although it’s not super important, I imagine I’ll just be on aperture priority most of the time
>Viewfinder would be nice, but ultimately size is more important
>A compact ~35mm equivalent lens that isn’t too slow

I’ve seen picrel talked about a lot, but I don’t really have a good grasp of the overall landscape to put it it into context. I’ve also seen a lot of people shit on it here which is expected considering it seems pretty popular. It looks nice, but I imagine I’ll be just as happy with something half that price if it’s well built. If there’s a good MFT option that might be interesting as I wouldn’t mind getting some lenses for that, but most of the time I’ll just use a wide so even something with a built in lens isn’t really a dealbreaker if the overall package is good.