In relation to the “street photography” thing,. Anyone I wonder how to silence the shutter? I tuners down all the sounds to zero (same as my GX7) but I find when I press the shutter release the camera makes a sound like the shutter flaps about 3 times and it’s not quiet at all,.
Not a major issue but I would prefer if I could quiet it by at least half!
Did you enable electronic shutter already (REC > Shutter Type > ESHTR? Note that ESHTR may drop to 10-bit RAWs instead of 12-bit.
The other way is instead of turning all sounds to zero manually, just set the camera to silent mode in the custom menu. You can assign this to a function button if you want to toggle it on and off quickly.
If it's still making sounds, it may be the aperture of the lens. M43 focuses wide open and then stops down the lens when taking the picture. If you want to avoid this you can set the camera to "Constant Preview" in the Custom menu (note only works in M mode). This will have the aperture stopped down the entire time. Note that it may make focusing slower and also preview slower (as it simulates the shutter speed also).
I believe that with the GX8, and since, all Panasonic cameras do not drop bit rate when in ESHTR.
There was never any conclusive test done for the GX85 and GX9 that I have read, so it's unknown. For earlier cameras however it was known that the bit rate does drop.
When I got my GX9 I tested the eshtr modes of this and my gx80. Looking At the RAWs with rawdigger the GX9 produces indistinguishable files for both mechanical and electronic shutter. The GX80 RAWs are markedly different between eshtr and mechanical.
Conclusive? It is to me and I use GX9 in ESHTR unless I need to use mechanical.
I'm an engineering type and I prefer quantitative and repeatable results, so I did my own analysis using a repeatable method (which anyone can do themselves with free software). There was another post that said when a camera switches to 10-bit it ignores the lower 2 bits. So I used dcraw to convert the RW2 to a grayscale PGM file (keeping all unscaled/uninterpolated RAW data). I then examined it in a hex editor (I used HXD) and value of the lower 2 bits are "11" for almost all pixels in the 10-bit files (not the case for 12-bit). I wrote a program to count the occurrence of all the different values of the lower 2 bits to make things easier. I got e-shutter samples from the exposure latitude comparison tool in DPReview or searching through galleries of imaging resource or photographyblog for rw2 samples at shutter speeds higher than mechanical (I verified shutter type was electronic with exiftool).
The results I got was as below:
10-bit e-shutter:
GM1
GM5
GX85
G7
GH4
12-bit e-shutter:
GF7
GX850 (GF9)
GX8
GX9
G85
Need a e-shutter RW2 sample to determine:
GX7
GH5
GH5S
G9
As you can see, the 10-bit e-shutter also occurred in cameras after the GX8 (GX85 came after), but 12-bit also was before, even in the entry level cameras. I was a bit surprised at some (like how GF7 has 12-bit while GM series didn't). I think Panasonic mainly made a decision on each camera (slower readout vs 10-bit at faster readout), not really a set pattern or a specific date they decided to do one way or the other.
This is getting very off topic, so I will perhaps start another thread for reference, but I'm still missing a few samples of the modern cameras.
) . Confirms since GX8, e-shutter does not drop from 12 to 10.
