Electronic shutter: advantages and disadvantages

texinwien wrote:

rurikw wrote:

Could imagine problems with handheld architectural photography: vertical lines becoming slightly wobbly or skewed. Anybody noticed anything like that?

Yes, I do believe you're correct here.

Out of several thousand photos I took with my E-M5 II on a trip to Tuscany earlier this summer, most with the E-Shutter, I have noticed a very small number of degraded results that I think are explained by the phenomenon you suggested.

Were you using continuous autofocus?

An alternate explanation would be that if you were using CAF the camera focused past infinity halfway through the exposure and then pulled back but not enough. A lot can happen in 1/25 of a second.

I have taken photos with motion blur using the ES and they do not look like that. Motion blur usually has a smeared appearance and the right half of your sample looks soft all over. When using the ES I typically see motion blur in bands that vary and the right half of the photo is soft in a very uniform way. It would be very hard to generate constant motion blur like that. At 12mm and 1/1000 it would be hard to generate motion blur at all but you could see some artifacts from the electronic shutter.

Try taking a picture with a 300mm lens with a high shutter speed, using the electronic shutter, with IS off and without a tripod. I have done this and what you typical get is straight vertical lines (if you are in landscape mode) stay sharp but become squiggly or curved.