Which Kind Of Shutter To Use On Your Mirrorless Camera

This is about mirrorless cameras and the different kinds of shutter operations of which some of them are capable. The three options are 1) mechanical shutter, 2) first curtain electronic shutter, and 3) full electronic shutter.

This is going to be a short post because after introducing the subject, most of what I would want to say on the subject is in this video explanation from wildlife photographer Fabian Fopp.

But in a nutshell, a mechanical shutter uses a physical shutter than slides away from the front of the sensor and then back again for whatever length of time the shutter is open.

A first curtain shutter starts with an electronic read-out and ends with the mechanical shutter ending the exposure.

A fully electronic shutter does the whole thing electronically.

The question is, which to use and why and when.

Here is wildlife photographer Fabian Fopp explaining it – and there’s a link below his video to a chart showing the read-out speeds of various cameras. That’s important because read-out speed affects which kind of shutter operation will suffer from certain downsides in certain situations.