Our only reference point at the moment is the cinema camera industry, where the global shutter has made a lot of recent progress in terms of size and cost. What’s the Catch?īeyond losing the beautiful sound of a mechanical shutter, the only catch is that we don’t know what size camera- or what capabilities of a camera- will be sacrificed to achieve a global shutter. This means the efficiency loss of High Speed Sync would be gone and your strobes would be more capable at high shutter speeds. A global shutter could sync with flash at any shutter speed without the need for High Speed Sync. How High Speed Sync works and why it’s necessary could be an entire article itself, so I’ll skip to how this would change. Imagine having a camera with 750,000 exposures and having no concern that it will break soon. By removing the mechanical shutter, you are removing the most commonly serviced part in a camera. The biggest indicator of a camera’s wear and tear is the shutter actuations or shutter count- meaning, how many times the mechanical shutter has opened. Shutter shock occurs when the vibration of your mechanical shutter moves your camera enough to affect the clarity of your exposure. With all of those issues gone, there is no need for the mechanical shutter which only creates additional benefits. Your flash could sync with a global electronic shutter. Artificial light would not cause banding. There would be no distortion when photographing fast-moving subjects. Photo by Robert Hall Benefits of Global ShutterĪ global shutter would resolve all of the above. Not only would the flash used to light the subject not be visible, the visible light sources would all create banding across the image. Photos like this are simply impossible with the electronic shutters currently available.
The result would be only a portion of your photo showing the effect of flash.
There’s no point to it firing because the time it takes for the entire sensor to be captured would far exceed the duration of the flash pulse. Flash is deactivated when you use your camera’s electronic shutter. The distinct lines captured are the rows of pixels being captured at different moments. While the flicker isn’t visible to the naked eye, if your shutter speed is fast enough the result will be a banding pattern. This is the result of photographing a flickering light source such as CFLs or low quality LED with an electronic shutter. If you’ve ever used your silent shutter indoors, you probably ran into significant banding in your images. In both instances, the electronic shutter’s inability to capture the entire sensor at once is the problem. The same effect can be seen in photographs, often when photographing a fast-moving subject. Rolling shutter in video is a jello-like distortion that occurs during panning. Problems With Electronic Shutters Rolling Shutter Let’s go over the problems that current electronic shutters create. Regardless of the shutter speed, this process takes longer than the true time of exposure, which causes a lot of issues. Meaning, it processes some lines on the sensor, then the next ones, then the next, until it makes it down the entire sensor. The electronic shutter records the data from the sensor in a line-by-line fashion. Because it’s electronic, it can be completely silent. The electronic shutter simulates a mechanical shutter by capturing the same information through an electronic process. That is the sound of physical shutter curtains opening and closing in front of the sensor-hence the mechanical name. The mechanical shutter is the one that goes “keh-chek” when you press the shutter. These days, most cameras have a mechanical shutter and an electronic shutter. What is a Global Shutter?Ī global shutter is an electronic shutter that reads the entire sensor in one instant. But there’s one elusive feature that I’ve been waiting years to see make its way into my cameras-the global shutter. It’s come to a point where the latest camera release garners no excitement from me.
Shutter count meaning professional#
I’ve been a professional photographer full-time for almost a decade and have witnessed tremendous improvements over the years.