Electronic or mechanical shutter? Locked

Do you guys mostly use electronic shutter instead of mechanical, I can see advantages like avoiding wear and tear of the shutter mechanism. What is the general rule for that? electronic 99% of the time and for fast moving objects like cars, birds, planes etc mechanical

Rafavox wrote:

Do you guys mostly use electronic shutter instead of mechanical, I can see advantages like avoiding wear and tear of the shutter mechanism. What is the general rule for that? electronic 99% of the time and for fast moving objects like cars, birds, planes etc mechanical

I use e-shutter whenever I can. That's the vast majority of the time with my R and M6II. I would use it more on my R7, if there were an 8fps option. For a lot of sports, I find 15fps to be overkill (not for all sports), so I use EFCS for that reason. Most of my shooting is unaffected by rolling shutter, so I don't often have to use mechanical (EFCS or full mechanical) to avoid that. I love e-shutter for event shooting indoors, and only use mechanical when the lighting causes banding with e-shutter, which doesn't happen often (luckily).

+1

DIGITAL-PURPLE wrote:

ld_bl wrote:

I almost exclusively use EFCS. 14 bit raws and no rolling shutter artefacts. Sometimes I'll full mechanical shutter when I shoot wide open in bright light to avoid the weird bokeh issues you get in those situations with EFCS. I only use electronic shutter if I need to be silent which is extremely rare.

What body you shoot with? I use electronic on the r3 and don't see bokeh artifacts, but now I wonder if mechanical would do it better. Who knows, the bokeh looks good tho!

Bokeh artifacts with fast primes and fast shutter speeds are affected by EFSC, not the electronic.

Rafavox wrote:

Do you guys mostly use electronic shutter instead of mechanical, I can see advantages like avoiding wear and tear of the shutter mechanism. What is the general rule for that? electronic 99% of the time and for fast moving objects like cars, birds, planes etc mechanical

It is highly subject/situation/camera dependent. With my R6 fully electronic shutter reduces RAW bit depth therefore adds shadows noise and reduces dynamic range.

That is why my default setting for the best IQ is EFSC (80% of time). When shooting with f/1.4 primes at shutter speeds below 1/1000s I swich to mechanical because of the bokeh (15%). In cases when fully silent shooting is a must or when I want to use the 20fps despite the slightly reduced IQ, I swich to electronic (5%).

ld_bl wrote:

I almost exclusively use EFCS. 14 bit raws and no rolling shutter artefacts. Sometimes I'll full mechanical shutter when I shoot wide open in bright light to avoid the weird bokeh issues you get in those situations with EFCS. I only use electronic shutter if I need to be silent which is extremely rare.

Good and important point; a lot of people are either not aware of or don't care about the ES producing 12-bit raws rather than 14.

Distinctly Average wrote:

ppage wrote:

ld_bl wrote:

I almost exclusively use EFCS. 14 bit raws and no rolling shutter artefacts. Sometimes I'll full mechanical shutter when I shoot wide open in bright light to avoid the weird bokeh issues you get in those situations with EFCS. I only use electronic shutter if I need to be silent which is extremely rare.

Good and important point; a lot of people are either not aware of or don't care about the ES producing 12-bit raws rather than 14.

It makes very little difference to the final edited pic IMO. There are times when it makes a difference but for me they are rare and I am sure they are for many who shoot the same way as I do. The advantages of the ease of tracking many subjects in ES outweighs the 12bit vs 14bit output.

True; it depends on what one is doing; I don't think everyone should be using EFCS just because it produces 14-bit raws.   I do mostly landscapes and so it matters to me; if I was shooting sports it probably wouldn't.  My point was simply that people should know about this difference between ES and EFCS and then their decision to use one or the other will be better informed.

ld_bl wrote:

I almost exclusively use EFCS. 14 bit raws and no rolling shutter artefacts. Sometimes I'll full mechanical shutter when I shoot wide open in bright light to avoid the weird bokeh issues you get in those situations with EFCS. I only use electronic shutter if I need to be silent which is extremely rare.

Same here.  EFCS is my default setting.  Mainly to avoid shutter shock in the 1/125 - 1/160 range.

Just for the record my main setting is Electronic Shutter. Like others I'm also concerned about "tear and ware" on my R6 MK1, so 99.99% I use ES.

I have been using electronic shutter on my R6 mostly for the past year but if possible I change to ECFS to maintain backgrounds from skewing. If your subject is against an "organic" (round parts of trees) or otherwise blurred background it is fine but not when I run into trees, buildings and poles.

If I really don't need to capture so many frames, I switch down to [H] mode instead of H+ because it allows for 14-bit files instead of 13-bit. H mode also allows you to take advantage of "high speed display" which means you see  some motion between shots. Nowhere as smooth like a stacked sensor (more like 15fps)  but far less choppy than H+ which shows a disorienting frameskip.

Wing warping is one thing with rolling shutter but another is jagged artifacts on the wingtips, similar to "bad deinterlacing/combing" for videos. I discussed it in this thread:
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4659188

I find that for some situations this can be somewhat fixed in post but there's no easy way outside of using a brush to smear or blur out the wingtips around. Sometimes but not always Topaz Denoise will try to denoise the wingtips and thus it greatly reduces the artifacts, while DxO DeepPRIME seems to make it worse especially if there is lens sharpness turned on (in PhotoLab, in PureRAW it is applied to some extent even if "turned off"). If possible I just mask a layer for the DxO and Topaz treatments.

I do a lot of flash work these days, so I mostly work with mechanical shutter. Also, as mentioned by many in this thread, there are a few (minor) issues with ES, with artificial lighting, bokeh, dynamic range, rolling shutter etc.  And I'm old school, so unless my R5 is on tripod, or need absurd frame rates, it just stays in mechanical mode.

Rafavox wrote:

Do you guys mostly use electronic shutter instead of mechanical, I can see advantages like avoiding wear and tear of the shutter mechanism. What is the general rule for that? electronic 99% of the time and for fast moving objects like cars, birds, planes etc mechanical

As has been mentioned, shutter selection is very situation-dependent (and body-dependent).  For instance owners of the R3 will find fewer restrictions than those with say an R7.

I was thrilled when the R6 Mark II was announced having a much faster readout speed than my Mark I.  It was the primary deciding factor in my decision to upgrade.  The R6(ii) is my main event/sports body.  Electronic shutter can be invaluable in many instances (IME).

The R5 is my birding/wildlife body, and the fast(er) readout speed was a big deciding factor in choosing it over the R6 when they came out.  Here again eShutter can be really useful.

The R7 IMO seemed purpose-built for my macros.  I use eShutter bursts a lot with my LEDs.  Rolling shutter is seldom an issue.

It’s nice to have choices.  Universal Shutter will come into play at some point.  Until then, we’ll still have to use our photography smarts.  

R2