I have a Canon EOS R50, a mirrorless camera, which also seems shutterless - If I take pictures of, for example, an airplane with a spinning propeller, will I still get that “strange rubber propeller” effect? 1) the camera may have a shutter and I just don’t recognize it or 2) the sensor is read in such a way as to produce the effect.

  • @Langehund
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    5 months ago

    Most consumer cameras use CMOS photo sensors, and among those, only the higher end sensors are capable of global shutter (the image is captured at the same moment electronically). CCD sensors are typically more expensive but h they often use global shutter. The EOS R50 is like most consumer cameras with its CMOS sensor.

    Most mechanical shutters will have a leading and trailing curtain with a variable gap between them that controls exposure. The wider the gap, the longer the light hits a row of pixels and the higher the exposure. Your camera’s shutter is slightly different in the fact that instead of using two shutter curtains it only has the trailing one. The exposure is started electronically and stopped mechanically by the trailing curtain. This hybrid shutter is called EFCS (Electronic First Curtain Shutter). Additionally the shutter can be controlled entirely electronically by sampling the sensor values row by row in essentially the same way the mechanical shutter works.

    Without a true global shutter, the rolling shutter effect will be produced when filming or photographing fast moving subjects. So yes, your camera would do what most other cameras do.

    • WasPentaliveOP
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      15 months ago

      Thanks. So I am guessing the shutter is only present when actually taking a picture since the view-finder is fed from the sensor?

      • @Langehund
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        15 months ago

        Yes. If you take a picture and hear the standard click sound that is the mechanical shutter covering the sensor. If you want to shoot silently, that’s when you’d use the electronic shutter. For your camera you can find that setting under the Camera Icon tab in the menu (should be first tab), then the sixth page that starts with focus bracketing. The setting is called shutter mode and will be either Elec. 1st-curtain, or Electronic