Question about e-shutter on R

philmar wrote:

I don't even know what e-shutter" is....I've looked in the paper manual and it makes no mention of e-shutter in either the Table of Contents or Index.

How did you learn about it?

Sorry. e-shutter is electronic shutter. On the R, it's called silent shutter. The R has three shutter modes: full mechanical, electronic first curtain, and full electronic. Full mechanical is pretty much what all film cameras had. You have two shutter curtains. First, one opens, exposing the film or sensor, and then the second closes. For exposure shorter than the flash synch speed, the second curtain starts closing before the first one finishes opening, so you actually get a band of exposed film/sensor that travels across. Which is why you need to use high speed synch on a flash to shoot with shutter speeds higher than the synch speed (the flash fires multiple bursts). Electronic first curtain starts with one mechanical curtain already open, activates the sensor, then closes the second mechanical curtain. Fully electronic (silent shutter) starts with the shutter open (which it is most of the time, otherwise we wouldn't be getting a view from the sensor), and simply activates the sensor for the specified amount of time. But in pretty much all modern sensors, the activation doesn't happen across the whole shutter at once, but happens in waves across the sensor (a bit like the moving curtain of a mechanical shutter). This is what can cause what's called "rolling shutter", which can distort how things look, if they, or the camera, are moving during the exposure. At some point soon(ish), we'll get cameras with "global shutter" in electronic mode, which will have the whole sensor exposed at once. This will eliminate rolling shutter, and enable high flash synch speeds.

A confusing thing about the R is that the shutter modes aren't simply called what they are. Electronic shutter is called "Silent Shutter". Electronic first curtain is called "Silent LV shooting" (mode 1 or 2). And full mechanical shutter is simply what you get when you select "Disable" for Silent LV shooting.