> ...notably the Fuji XF-100 or Leica Q. These things are kind of expensive...
I would have preferred camera examples that cost less than $1,000. At $4,000+ for Leica that's much more than an average photography enthusiast would spend on camera "just for fun".
Since the author begins by describing medium format cameras as the most interesting, I think the prices are anchored to on the photography cheap-expensive scale, where a 'moderately priced' tripod head costs as much as an entry level DSLR which is a camera that professionals would have mortgaged the house to buy twenty five years ago.
I'll second this, although I'd recommend staying away from the X100. It had some issues with autofocus that were mostly corrected with firmware updates, but weren't completely addressed. The X100S and T are both excellent cameras.
Shooting with a prime (fixed focal length) lens will give you significantly better image quality at a lighter weight than using a zoom lens. I don't think you need much more than 16MP. That resolution is good enough for publishing in a top tier national magazine[1], and it'll be good enough for your computer screen.
In support of the claim that 16MP is enough, it is also instructive to recall that a full magazine page at 300 DPI is ~8.4 megapixels. So 16MP is technically just about good enough for a double-page spread.
That's around 300 PPI, which is way more than enough; most photographs don't consist of super-high-contrast aliased lines, and thus will typically look OK printed at considerably less than 300PPI; depending on context you could go as low as 100-200PPI. 300DPI is a bare minimum more because then the printer dots are bare visible; and of course you need many printer dots per pixel to be able to create smooth-looking gradients. It doesn't say as much about pixels.
Of course, if you're printing sub-8MP images on a full page, then you can count on all those pixels being important, so any pixel-level defects that are usually hidden by their tiny size will become visible (hot pixels, noise, that kind of thing)
With a Bayer sensor [1], multiple pixels are interpolated to determine the color and luminance of each output pixel...a typical digital camera can not capture two adjacent red pixels. On the other hand, print inks will tend to bleed and so it's hard to pixel peep a magazine image.
I would have preferred camera examples that cost less than $1,000. At $4,000+ for Leica that's much more than an average photography enthusiast would spend on camera "just for fun".