Dynamic Range e-shutter vs mechanical shutter

[Impulses]

"Our OM-1 files are 12 bit and it makes no difference if one shoots with mechanical or electronic shutter. My personal preference is electronic shutter unless using flash or there is dramatic movement in the subject."

Been saying this for some time now. But there are the non believers I guess.

 

[cba_melbourne]

"Our OM-1 files are 12 bit and it makes no difference if one shoots with mechanical or electronic shutter. My personal preference is electronic shutter unless using flash or there is dramatic movement in the subject."

Been saying this for some time now. But there are the non believers I guess.

I thought examples of this were pretty obvious? Some of the Pana bodies that do drop their bit-rate with e-shutter still output 12-bit files but just write trash to pad them and they're clearly 10-bit when pushed.

The GM cameras do that. And they switch to electronic shutter and 10bit automatically whenever the exposure time is shorter than 1/500s. Because it uses a tiny small single curtain shutter, that cannot expose faster than 1/500. There are also other conditions where these cameras automatically switch to ES/10bit mode. So it is not always obvious to the user because it is not a conscious user choice. See the manual:



All Panasonic cameras that came later and are using this same particular shutter, behave similarly, up to and including the G850.

I am not sure about the G100 with also uses the same GM shutter, but has the new 20MP sensor. Will it drop to 10 bit or not?

 

[scathontiphat]

So i know this is a bit of an older thread. But i just picked up a Panasonic GX-880 as a nice little travel camera. As i tend to shoot with lenses wide open, and also have a manual lens which forces me to use the e-shutter, I set off to learn more about the e-shutter. In my research about the differences I came across this thread and others mentioning that the RAW file has less real bits of information. My First thought was, damn, maybe i should consider a GX9 and take the hit in size to enable higher mechanical shutter speeds, but decided to try to test this out a bit for a real world shot.

the below images are by no means scientific, but basically shot my GX880 + 20/1.7 at ISO 200 and used an ND filter to get one shot with the e-shutter and one with the mechanical. shots were hand held, and my ND filter is 77mm, so that's literally just held in front of the lens. Because the ND introduces some color cast and changes the flare characteristics, the shots are not exactly the same, but close enough IMO. In Lightroom I boosted the shadows to +100 and pulled back the highlights a bit. The amount of highlights pull varies a bit between shots because i was lazy and let the camera auto expose at a given aperture rather than going into manual and adjusting 3 stops (also i don't think my ND8 is exactly an ND8).

If there is indeed a loss of dynamic range, i have a really hard time seeing the difference even viewing at 100%. Looking at shadows both seem about the same, and looking at highlighs both seem about the same. I also never print images at 72dpi (200dpi tends to be my personal limit), so i don't think i would ever see the difference in any printed photos. makes me not worry too much about this potential "flaw".

anyhow, thought i'd put the test photos up for reference in case anyone is curious about this in the future. Images have been cropped a bit to make them look more similar since this was handheld and the framing isn't exactly the same.

My conclusion is that either the GX880 no longer has the decreased effective bit raw files OR that such a difference makes no real impact when taking pictures of things other than test cards OR you might only see the hit in DR if you’re trying to push the image several stops from an image that you missed the exposure on.

 

[cba_melbourne]

So i know this is a bit of an older thread. But i just picked up a Panasonic GX-880 as a nice little travel camera. As i tend to shoot with lenses wide open, and also have a manual lens which forces me to use the e-shutter, I set off to learn more about the e-shutter. In my research about the differences I came across this thread and others mentioning that the RAW file has less real bits of information. My First thought was, damn, maybe i should consider a GX9 and take the hit in size to enable higher mechanical shutter speeds, but decided to try to test this out a bit for a real world shot.

the below images are by no means scientific, but basically shot my GX880 + 20/1.7 at ISO 200 and used an ND filter to get one shot with the e-shutter and one with the mechanical.

But are you sure your camera did actually use the mechanical shutter? With my GM cameras there are several conditions that make the camera use electronic shutter without letting you know. For example if you have the menu function silent shutter activated. Or if burst rate is set to SH. With all manual lenses. And with some specific m43 AF lenses too. See the GM5 manual page below. Compare it to your own camera manual.

shots were hand held, and my ND filter is 77mm, so that's literally just held in front of the lens. Because the ND introduces some color cast and changes the flare characteristics, the shots are not exactly the same, but close enough IMO. In Lightroom I boosted the shadows to +100 and pulled back the highlights a bit. The amount of highlights pull varies a bit between shots because i was lazy and let the camera auto expose at a given aperture rather than going into manual and adjusting 3 stops (also i don't think my ND8 is exactly an ND8).

If there is indeed a loss of dynamic range, i have a really hard time seeing the difference even viewing at 100%. Looking at shadows both seem about the same, and looking at highlighs both seem about the same. I also never print images at 72dpi (200dpi tends to be my personal limit), so i don't think i would ever see the difference in any printed photos. makes me not worry too much about this potential "flaw".

anyhow, thought i'd put the test photos up for reference in case anyone is curious about this in the future. Images have been cropped a bit to make them look more similar since this was handheld and the framing isn't exactly the same.

My conclusion is that either the GX880 no longer has the decreased effective bit raw files OR that such a difference makes no real impact when taking pictures of things other than test cards OR you might only see the hit in DR if you’re trying to push the image several stops from an image that you missed the exposure on.

 

[glassoholic]

"Our OM-1 files are 12 bit and it makes no difference if one shoots with mechanical or electronic shutter. My personal preference is electronic shutter unless using flash or there is dramatic movement in the subject."

Been saying this for some time now. But there are the non believers I guess.

I thought examples of this were pretty obvious? Some of the Pana bodies that do drop their bit-rate with e-shutter still output 12-bit files but just write trash to pad them and they're clearly 10-bit when pushed.

The GM cameras do that. And they switch to electronic shutter and 10bit automatically whenever the exposure time is shorter than 1/500s. Because it uses a tiny small single curtain shutter, that cannot expose faster than 1/500. There are also other conditions where these cameras automatically switch to ES/10bit mode. So it is not always obvious to the user because it is not a conscious user choice. See the manual:



All Panasonic cameras that came later and are using this same particular shutter, behave similarly, up to and including the G850.

I am not sure about the G100 with also uses the same GM shutter, but has the new 20MP sensor. Will it drop to 10 bit or not?

That's funny about the warning of using e shutter (silent) to take pics of people (surreptitiously) ... the last point from your screenshot.

--
Addicted To Glass
M43 equivalence: "Twice the fun with half the weight"
"You are a long time dead" -
Credit to whoever said that first and my wife for saying it to me... Make the best you can of every day!

 

[scathontiphat]

But are you sure your camera did actually use the mechanical shutter? With my GM cameras there are several conditions that make the camera use electronic shutter without letting you know. For example if you have the menu function silent shutter activated. Or if burst rate is set to SH. With all manual lenses. And with some specific m43 AF lenses too. See the GM5 manual page below. Compare it to your own camera manual.

Yeah, it was definitely mechanical shutter on one and e-shutter on the other. you can clearly hear the difference when shooting (i.e. one makes a noise and the other doesn't). Also you can confirm by the presence of the e-shutter icon on the screen.

Decided to test my other hypothesis that maybe i just wasn't pushing the photo enough to see the difference. So here's a contrived test to see if that was the case, and indeed it was. Combination of under exposure plus the different color temperatures of inside versus out plus extreme post processing was enough to show the difference . below is the original shot before post processing in lightroom:



took one with e-shutter, then used an ND2 to get one with mechanical shutter. pushed both files in Lightroom to +2EV exposure, highlights -100, and shadows +100*. Note that personally i would never push a file like that anyways as I'm not a fan of that sort of HDR-look. Nevertheless, this has shown that indeed there is a loss of information when shooting on e-shutter for the GX-880. Bummer. But seeing that i would never intentionally expose like this, nor would i generally apply this sort of post processing, i think that this is of little consequence to myself. Although others might care more about this particular use case. and hopefully this is useful knowledge for others!





*side note, did a quick messing with the sliders to see what +100 meant in terms of stops in the shadows, and it was equivalent to about 2 extra stops of pushing. which means i'm pushing the shadows 4 stops here! if i was a professional event shooter or in some other situation where the thought of missing a shot due to improper exposure caused me great consternation and recovering an underexposed image was very important, this would be meaningful, but then i wouldn't be bringing a tiny GX880 or any of the other tiny 1/500s max single curtain shutter cameras either!