Is It a Professional, Prosumer, or Consumer Camera?

Does it matter?  First, what is meant by those terms?  Generally, a professional camera would be used by photographers who are considered professional photographers - ones who earn their living by doing photography.  Those who use a prosumer camera would be for those who are more advanced than a beginner, but not yet a professional - they can be used in fully automatic to fully manual.  And a consumer camera (aka point and shoot) would be used by those who take photos just for fun and want the camera to do all the thinking as far as focus and exposure (fully automatic).

For now, we're just talking about cameras and not lenses.  There are a lot of gray areas and overlap between all three.  Cameras that several years ago were considered the top of the line professional cameras are now considered "prosumer."  But they still take the same quality photos they always did.  So does it matter?  A lot depends on what kind of photography you do as a professional as well as what kind of environments you might be shooting in (in harsh environments you would want a weather sealed camera).  Most important is whether your camera will give you the photos you want, and if you have clients,  will it give your clients the results they want.

Years ago I bought my first professional camera, the one that many other professional photographers were using - a Nikon FTn film camera, with built in light meter.  Everything was manual - no auto focus, no auto exposure.  People loved the results.  Today, using a prosumer camera, the results are better and more accurate.  Why is it called a prosumer camera?  Is it a marketing gimmick?  Cameras labeled as professional are a lot more expensive.  For fun, I did a comparison on Google for my camera and the one they label as a professional camera (Nikon D800) - mine scored 99 out of 100, the Nikon D800 scored 100.  The biggest differences were in megapixels (36 vs 24) and battery life (1200 exposures vs 900 exposures per charge).

Some sample photos from the Nikon D800 (I did not take the Nikon D800 photos) - the top photo was full size, the one underneath it is a crop of that photo.  As can be seen, because of the extra megapixels, it can be cropped a bit larger.

The next two photos were self portraits (aka selfies) shot with a Nikon D600.  First the full-size photo, and then the cropped one.

There are a few differences between the two sets of photos (besides the subjects, ha ha!) - the top one was shot with a 24-105 f4 Nikon lens and an umbrella flash off camera, and the bottom one with a 28-300 f3.5-5.6 lens with the on camera flash.  As far as the results with each one, I would think she would have been happy with her portrait, and same for me, although had I used different lighting the results would have been better (either outdoor natural light, professional indoor flash, or perhaps window light - always experiment).

The following photo was shot on Aug 6, 2017 at the Festival of Chariots at Venice Beach, California with the "prosumer" Nikon.  The one on top is the photo out of the camera, reduced in size for this article.  The cropped section is at about 100% of the original size.

The camera setting for this photo was 135mm, f10, ISO 1600, 1/800 second, hand held.  Would this have been better with what is considered a "professional" camera?

This article is only comparing camera bodies.  Lenses can be even more important, depending on the which camera they are on.  For portraits, prime lenses will usually give better results, although whether someone will notice the difference is something else to think about.  After all, all photos above were taken with zoom lenses, and not top of the line ones.