Cauldyth may i ask what camera you bought?
I actually went for a DSLR, the Nikon D7100. The reason is that I have a very specific use for my camera. When I go on vacation, I want to take pictures of wildlife and nature, and ideally be able to print them as large as possible for hanging on my wall. Until now, I've been using the Canon SD990 from 2009, which at the time was a higher end point-and-shoot compact. Here are a couple sample pics, and why they motivated me to invest in a DSLR.
The above pic was taken in the early morning while hiking through the rainforest in Japan. The pic itself is kind of interesting, but it doesn't do the place justice. The forest (on the island of Yakushima, if anyone cares) was a million shades of green upon green. It was mindblowing. Unfortunately, being early morning in the rainforest, there was very little light. The Canon SD990, like most compacts, has a very tiny sensor behind a very small lens. The camera struggled to capture enough light, and had to compensate. The pic is very washed out, and the shutter speed was long.
The long shutter speed is responsible for the blurring of the falling water, which can be a nice effect, but if I wanted to get a fast shutter speed pic where you could resolve each drop of water, that simply wasn't an option. Now take into account that I was hiking, hot, tired, and breathing heavily, and many of the pics I took would be blurry because I couldn't manually hold the camera still during the long shutter. The above pic is one of the few that I managed to take without blur throughout. I may never make it back there, and I don't have any pics of the place that do it justice.
Here's another pic:
This is taken with the SD990 in the Australian outback, and while it's also a nice pic, using a dedicated macro lens would've made for a much more spectacular picture. (Search online for macro insect photos to see some examples, I won't post any here in the interest of bandwidth).
Now, to tackle both of these subjects properly, I really need an interchangeable lens camera. That means either DSLR or mirrorless. Mirrorless are great because you can slap a pancake lens on them, making them pocketable. If you later want a big honking zoom or macro lens, then you can slap those on instead. For me though, since I only use my camera for the above two situations, I'd only ever have a big lens attached, in which case a mirrorless wouldn't be pocketable anyway.
What's left is the better affordability of the mirrorless. Well, I'm taking a trip to Borneo in 2 months, and that's another place I may never visit again, so I figured I'd blow the extra money and have a shot at the best pics a newb like me could get. We'll see how that works out...
Sorry for the long ramble...
