Have you ever wondered what exactly happens when you press your DSLR's shutter button? Many of us know the theory, we may have even seen (or made) diagrams and GIFs showing how the standard mechanical shutter works. But for this video, YouTuber Chris Marquardt actually yanked the shutter out of a Nikon D500 to show you the mechanism IRL.
The demonstration is pretty simple, showing you how the two spring-loaded curtains move across the frame, and revealing the electromagnets that keep them in place when the curtains are cocked.
"The first and second curtain are both cocked against spring tension and held back by electro magnets," explains Marquardt. "When it's time to fire the shutter, the electronics release the first curtain, then after the exposure time is up, the second curtain." It's definitely an interesting demo if you enjoy these kind of tear downs, although you might want to turn the volume down... or off. As our own Richard Butler put it, the music "makes me want to rip my sound card out of my computer and destroy it." Okay then...
Once you've watched the video (sound card intact, we hope), click the button below to read our more comprehensive dive into all things shutter related.
what annoys me is people phrase about ES and how quiet it is but still enable MS simulated sound. ask them why, they say need it for confirmation. why do manufacturers develop ES and provide a MS simulated sound? if the MS sound is desired, why do we bother arguing about shutter sound?
I have Nikon D70 & D3100 DSLRs, and Canon 5D, 5Dii and 70D. They are all quieter than my film Nikons of the past (F and F2). My Olympus E-PLs are just as noisy as the Canons - mirrorless but mechanical shutter. I hate the soundtracks on videos where there is no relation between the sound and the visuals. Is it the millennial mind that needs constant aural stimulation?
it's not my type of music, but the warning made me expect something much worse too. The music sounds synthetic and is also repetitive, as you say, and I think it's too distractive for this kind of video content, but I think the writer has overdone the warning.
If you've ever had the pleasure of standing amongst 50 to 100 press photographers and listening to the magical symphony of high speed shutter releases you would shave your hipster beards, ditch your mirrorless and revel in the sound of mechanical shutterdom forever!
That's not a "magical symphony". That's the sound of the soon-to-be past. I prefer a quieter world. Thankfully, technology is steadily allowing us to move towards a quieter world that isn't filled with so much un-necessarily noise pollution.
@T3 Honestly, I had people with mirrorless close to me whose shutter sound was much louder than the sound of my D-SLRs mirror and shutter altogether. So, at the moment, D-SLRs are quiter than mirrorless with mechanical shutter because some companys focusing on mirrorless still don't have the tenth of years experience to get them quiter. This will still come of course :) At the moment mechanical shutter is preferred for moving subjects as it is still faster than global/rolling electronic shutter resulting in a less apparent effect of tearing in stills, banding with flickering light sources or other effects because the electronic one takes a bit longer. I think it takes about ten years till an electronic shutter beats a mechanical one so I wont talk about soon. Ok if you only take photos of static subjects, you can get a nice benefit right now but you could also take great pictures then with a cellphone on a tripod ;)
@cosinaphile Of course, I haven't heard the sound of all mirrorless cameras beside me. Mainly the sony or olympus ones. With electronic shutter, they were noiseless but with mechanical, most of them were louder than the mirror. Haven't met one with fuji yet - so I don't know better.
PS: the AF of one of my sigma lenses was louder than everything else ;)
Ah ok. My most recent D-SLR is a 7DII and its damn queit for a flapping mirror especially when set to silent continious shooting mode (but even the "normal" 10fps mode is everything but noisy).
Let's see when I meet someone with a fuji or at least stay close to one. But recently, I see more and more people taking photos with sonys..
And btw, the nicest shutter & mirror sound has still my old eos 400D. This camera just sounds nice :) As if it were moving a film (note: I'm too young for the film era), but that sound is just magic in my ears.
@mgblack74 - More and more mirrorless cameras are giving us the option of electronic shutters. Furthermore, for those mirrorless cameras that do have shutters, they lack the "clack" of a reflex mirror flipping up and down, which also adds quite a bit of noise. I have a Fuji X-E1, and even with a mechanical shutter it's quieter than my DSLR because it doesn't have a flipping mirror.
I'd like to echo Photoreader's question - how does the electromagnetic system work when the camera is a) turned off, b) the battery is removed, or c) the battery is just dead? What state is the shutter in normally, i.e. between shots? I know that in the days of manual shutter winds, moving the film advance lever not only advanced the film by one frame but also "cocked the shutter" - i.e. put it into a state of tension, which would be released by taking an exposure. In fact, in those days there was advice that it wasn't a good idea to leave the shutter cocked when the camera wasn't being used - the springs could lose tension.
But what happens these days with DSLRs with shutters?
Get some clue of what? As the engineers at Nikon did construct this device, and all it's predecessors, what could they learn from such a video? Aside from the fact that people are interested in their technology.
they can learn how to make proper shutter mechanism, so customers are not have to send their camera back to manufacturer for 3rd time to fix defective shutter.
Blimey, it looks like an escapee from the Oxford Museum of the History of Science. And all so light can hit a chip rather than film. Does a mirrorless shutter work like this?
When the cocked shutter curtains are held by solenoids, how does this work with the camera turned off or when the battery is removed? Are the curtains cocked before taking the picture? Wouldn't the delay be too long? Or is there a kind of locking mechanism or will the internal battery of the cam be used then?
Yes, but they get burned with holes when trying to take pictures of sun. The cloth is coated with rubber. With time it does not seal light very well.
Also, because of the size, it needs to be horizontally traveling, so traveling time is slower, which means you cannot sync flash on very short times, the limit is usually up to 1/60, and shutter speed is rarely beyond 1/1000.
Nikon tried to overcome some of these problems with titanium curtains on Nikon F, F2, and F3. Canon did the same on F-1N.
Eventually all camera manufacturers switched to the vertically traveling mechanism as shown in the clip. In high end cameras curtains are not metal or plastic, but composite, like carbon fiber reinforced.
Anyway, most of the noise is made by the mirror, you could take an advantage of quiet shutter only on range finder. Cloth shutter was not super quiet either. Really quiet mechanical shutter was and still is leaf shutter.
@TheCollector Thanks for the great recap. In my mind I can hear the sound of a horizontal cloth shutter right now... Canon were the last to abandon it, yes?
Some less popular camera makers continued using cloth shutter until the very end of film photography era. They just couldn't catch up later when the digital came.
Sorry, but this is a shutter from a Canon EOS 1000 F . The principle on a D500 would be the same, but have a look at the electronics. This is technology from the last century.
Thanks. I figured that the camera model was wrong because that thing was way worn and old looking. I don't think you could wear a D500 that much in only a year of use.
This is similar to the lever mechanisms used in the optical viewfinder shutter curtains of the film camera heydays, mostly in Nikon interchangeable viewfinders. They were painted in red and had a lever knob on the side of the eyepiece. The viewfinder curtains kept the light entering the eyepiece from striking the light meter and displaying a false reading.
Pro Nikon bodies still have these viewfinder shutters, got one on my D800 and D3. It supposedly stops light leaking in from the viewfinder during night shots, personally speaking I have never noticed this problem with the curtain open and shooting long exposures of the night sky.
Oh boy! I forgot about the viewfinder shutter on my D800 during my first daylight shot of a waterfall with a 10-stop gray filter. The images were ruined. It is about the ambient light level compared to the light allowed to enter through the lens. My Minolta XE-1 that i bought in 1976 has a viewfinder shutter. Some claim the mirror closes off the viewfinder prism. That is a good hypotheses, but on my D800 it is not validated by practical use. A piece of dark cloth is a quicker and less fiddly solution than the D800 lever that is a cheapo version of the lever on my Minolta.
Yes, for now. the a9 reads 12 rows at once, instead of one row at a time, like the mechanical shutter does. this causes the famous a9 banding issue. other than that, image quality is similar.
i also think (if i remember the number right) that the A9's eStutter speed is about twice as slow as the mechanical shutter ... fast enough, but still slower overall. That and the 12 line grouping, i think, are the only disadvantages that remain.
The DR decrease is due to the fact that (in true global shutter cameras) the pixel surface is smaller because a lot of electronics have to be fit in order to read all the pixels at once.
The A9 is not a global shutter. It just reads 12lines at a time, in a continuous cycle, until it finishes all the sensor.
'It's quite remarkable to note the camera's 1/160s electronic shutter rate - only 1 EV behind the 1/300s shutter rate of mechanical shutters - thanks to the high readout speed. This means that the electronic shutter in continuous drive is almost as good as a mechanical shutter in terms of avoiding banding at high shutter speeds under artificial light. Only under very unusual light sources have any problems arisen.'
The last line links to the Jared Pollin review where he experienced issues with the LED boards at a football game.
@new boyz The 'banding' was caused by the very high cycling of the LED lights at a football game - more than 7000Hz. The panels were at the side of the pitch and the light changes were only visible as reflections on the players and ball when they were close to the boards. A mechanical shutter would also have recorded light pulsing this fast.
I yearn for days when the shutter was photographer's palm; few magical movements in front of the lens, then screw in the lens cap again. And the photo magically appeared inside the box.
Spring-loaded shutters create shutter shock. They are obsolete for high-resolution sensors. It would be more interesting to see how the shutter manufacturers have dealt with this problem with magnetically-driven shutters. And manipulating sensitive mechanics with oily fingers, without gloves? Yech...
I like the subject, and the video is okay-ish, BUT! I HATE it when they show some complicated technical stuff with subtitles. You have to watch it twice or pause it all the time, because otherwise you'll miss either the video or the text.
Interesting. Although not all FP shutters work in exactly the same way and in some the blades are driven electromagnetically rather than by spring tension. The shutters in the latest Panasonic Lumix cameras are driven that way, which is why they are so quiet and free from vibration. And of course the entire shutter floats in a five-axis electromagnetic field. Now THAT'S high tech!
If you want to see a really fast shutter, just remove the lens and press the shutter button. It isnt very impressive looking because the shutter rate is still significantly longer than the 1/4000 shutter speed
As well as I know, flash sync speed is the fastest shutter speed with one curtain full open. Shutter speed that exeeds that is with smaller and smaller slot. (Two curtains) FP flash is "pulsing" (thus shorter light distance) all way up to 1/8000 Sek
Correct. So, the faster the shutter blades can move, the faster the flash sync speed can be. For FP shutters it's usually somewhere around 1/200 - 1/250 of a second but there are exceptions (in both directions) I guess this is partially determined by how powerful the springs are that drive the shutter blades open.
I'd say it is probably more about the material the shutters are made of. The higher quality carbon fiber or titanium ones are probably faster and last longer, but cost more to make, which is likely why they are only found in the more expensive cameras. Too bad they haven't figured out how to make them work reliably at twice the speed, so we can shoot at 1/500 sec. flash sync speed.
I would argue that if they're able to make a full frame camera sync at 250-320/s (e.g. D800), it should be easily possible to make a crop sensor or smaller camera sync at faster speeds than that. Smaller sensor means shorter distance to travel, so if all else is equal, it should enable a faster x-sync.
It may be seen as simply modern technology by many people but I never cease to be amazed at the miracle that is the digital camera. It wasn't very long ago that we humans mastered fire. . .
I concur. I still have two lenses to fix. I even removed the aperture blades of the Carl zeiss Jena 180mm f2.8 sonnar. When I opened it up to clean it bits fell out and I had no idea how to put these back. This lens should be used at f2.8 anyway otherwise I there is no point. Similarly, a Tair 300mm f4.5 photosniper. The blades are out of position and looks complicated to re position. I save that job for a rainy day.
Yep, get aperture blades out of position and you're in trouble. Recently cleaned several elements of my cheap Tamron 70-300 and had to disassemble the aperture blades housing to clean one of the rear elements. Not too complicated, but an enervating job nonetheless. Patience is a must.
I think the title is a bit misleading. What is being shown is not a specific shutter for DSLR cameras, but a focal-plane shutter, which is also used in mirrorless and rangefinder cameras. Anyway, the article is interesting for anyone who has never seen a focal-plane shutter with metal curtains working.
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