With the way the world is going, it’s too convenient to shoot photos on your smartphone. Charging your DSLR battery pack(s), making sure the memory cards are cleared, and lugging around a backpack full of lenses is a lot of work.

I have an old Canon 40D camera with both EF (full frame / crop) & EF-S (crop only) lenses. I’ll be traveling in a few months and I want something nicer than my iPhone for taking photos.

It seems like the two main options are: get a crop DSLR body or get a full frame DSLR body. Staying within Canon’s ecosystem would be the most convenient. Leaving Canon opens up a can of worms (Nikon, Sony, Pentax, etc?).

If I were to just suck it up, it seems like the answer would be to get a new full frame DSLR & L glass (24-70 EF lens). But I’m leaning towards getting some relatively cheap new crop DSLR body and just make do with what I have (as an economical choice).

With a camera, I care about low light sensitivity (ISO grain) and maybe shutter speed. I don’t care for video options as I don’t intend on shooting and editing movies.

Even though the standalone camera market seems to be dwindling, the big lenses & big image sensors of DSLRs will always provide photography that mobile phones cannot.