The Sony A6000 is one of the most popular cameras of all time for a reason: It is a very good camera for the money. The eagle looked plenty sharp. It may have focused on the feathers instead of the eyes, but this is a common problem even with eye-AF cameras: They get distracted by high-contrast areas.

The football picture and the flower are both sharp enough for the internet, but if you are making large prints, you may find them to be (very slightly) mis-focused.

You can try putting it in DMF, and then fine-tuning the focus to nail the exact spot you want, but this is just one of many suggestions. For flower pictures, the DMF trick works pretty well, and you may find that you get used to it pretty quickly. For sports pictures, I do not find it to be useful.

As a general rule, 1/250 is usually fast enough for pictures of people jogging; or up to about 7 mph. Anything faster than that, you have to scale your shutter speed.

Average speed for passenger steam trains is 28 mph, which is handy, because that gives you a good guess of shutter speed at about 1/1000.

If the train is moving at 50mph, (which is entirely possible) then it is best to assume that you have to be at 1/2000.

Yes and no.

The Snapdragon 855 in the new Samsung phones has about 5 billion transistors on a 64 bit chip, and is, quite frankly, optimized for gaming. (The new A13 processor that Apple uses has about 8 billion transistors on it, and the portions used for memory, AI, graphics and so on are all different.)

The Bionz X Processor in the new Sony cameras is a version of the old ARM A5 Android processor, which is a 32-bit system that was introduced back in 2011. (It was designed to do the same things as the ARM9 and ARM11, but to do them more slowly, with less heat, and with less power consumption.)

I am not an engineer, but just looking at the chip specs, my guess is that Sony could put much faster chips in their new cameras, but it would jack up the cost of an already expensive camera, and would more than double the heat as well.

The faster chips would add the ability to pre-process your images like cell phones do, but a lot of camera owners prefer the image to look "natural", and to add the tweaks to their own taste. The bigger chips would also give you the ability to make phone calls on your camera, (and to play 'Angry Birds'), but I don't see that being worth an extra $350.

Generally speaking, as long as the subject is well lit, moving slowly, and as long as you don't need to throw the background out of focus, a cell phone will work as well, or even better than, a dedicated camera. The reason is that they have huge processors attached that can do color balancing, noise control and image sharpening before you ever see the picture.

(And as the cell phone processors get more powerful, this will only get better.)

In low light, cell phone pictures start to fall apart a little, because they are taking longer exposures, or multiple shots and layering them. This works for pictures of food, but not usually people.

If the subject is moving quickly, the cell phone pictures will also fall apart a little. In good light, it will use a fast shutter speed, but in indoor light, you may be shooting at 1/80 second or lower. This is not fast enough for most indoor lighting.

If you need to blur out the background, then the only way cell phones can do that is to take two separate pictures and stitch them together. This is like teaching a pig to sing. The quality is not very good, but it is still a pretty good trick.

There used to be a photo shop down the street with a sign by the film drop off that said:
"The only business with more pressing deadlines is the Dry Cleaners next door."

My advice is to give up on the 30 MP and stick with 15 to 20. For any camera with a zoom that big, you will not need 30MP, because you can "crop" using the zoom lens. Even if you are taking landscape shots that you are going to blow up bigger than 1 meter, you will find that 20MP is plenty.

I have usually found the galleries to be worse than useless. One of the popular websites took out an MFT camera on a particularly gloomy day in London, and filled up a sample gallery with depressing grey pictures of people who looked like they all wanted to be somewhere else.

I am not sure if it hurt that camera's sales, but it certainly made an impact on me.

I have to agree this is what it looks like to me. The trees in the background are in focus, and your depth of field is big, but not nearly big enough to have the trees and the fishing line both in focus.

Sorry, I didn't mean to scare anyone.

The EF 200mm F2.8L II is about $700, and it is plenty good to use for indoor sports.

The 70-200 F2.8L is about $1300, and it is also plenty good for indoor sports.

I was just giving an example, but yes, there are tons of good distance lenses out there, and if you are willing to look at other brands besides Canon, you can save even more money without giving up much at all.

Sounds like you have (some) good advice. I will try to summarize my favorite parts:

1. Make sure you are getting the most out of the equipment you already own before trying new equipment.

2. An inexpensive 200mm lens (or longer) will give you better results than cropping a 28-80 lens. The Canon kit "long" zoom is the 75-300, which (I think) you can buy for only about $100, and is a very good lens for the money. (Make sure you get the version that works with your camera, I think there are two versions.)

3. Use 1/500 shutter speed to avoid motion blur. Don't let the camera pick the shutter speed for you. You can shoot in shutter priority, or full manual. (Your camera might have a "sports" mode, but I don't trust those.)

4. For football "under the lights", if you shoot at 1/500, and your lens only opens up to F5.6 like the 75-300, you will have to shoot at ISO 1600 or above. Most likely, you will have to shoot at ISO 3200. If the pictures look fine to you, then you have solved your problem.

5. If the pictures look too dark or grainy at 1/500; F5.6; ISO 3200, then it might be time to start looking at faster lenses. If you find the lens you want but your camera does not support it, then that is the time to start looking at different cameras.

Beware, though. This is a money sink. The Canon EF200mm F2 L is a beautiful lens. It will produce amazing shots, and will let you get that ISO down to 400 or lower. It costs about $5,500. That is not a typo. It is a beast of a lens, and there are people who make their living with it. It might be worth renting it (along with a big camera) for a big game just to see if you love it. The danger is that you might fall in love with it and start trying to justify it to yourself.

I agree with Linda that it looks like a leaf somewhere between you and the subject, or even a possibly the seal for the lens hood not tightened enough. Let me toss out one other idea:

The 500mm is a beast of a lens, and it takes several different lens hoods. The ET155 (or ET138?) is also pretty big, and extends well out beyond the end of the camera. Because both are so large, it is hard to tell if a drop of mist or condensation got on the lens itself.

I understood your post, I was making a point.

Just because people don't want to play Google games does not mean that we are confused.

Apple alone sells 210 million phones per year. That is about 10 times bigger than the total camera and accessory sales of every company on your entire list combined.

There is always some way to read the news that ignores the statistics.

I am not saying that a cell phone can take as good pictures as a real camera; it (usually) can't. Nor am I saying that the market for ILC's is dead; it seems to have gone back to about where it was historically.

I am just saying that a bunch of people decide every month to leave their dedicated camera at home and just take their pictures of sunsets (or dogs or beachwear or whatever) with their cell phone.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/26/japanese-camera-companies-fight-for-survival-in-the-smartphone-era.html

"Up" is a relative term. (The number steadied a bit in 2017 at about 25 million total units, and then declined again in 2018 to 17 million total units).

Although this is a much higher number than it was in 1965, and the cameras are substantially better, the huge boom that was created by the introduction of the DSLR is gone. Some of those people will buy a new camera when their old one wears out, so the market is not dead, but it is not going back over 100 million units per year any time soon.

And the reason for that is because cell phones have gotten so much better.

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