

When taking pictures, you will mostly hear a single click, but that’s because your shutter speed is typically so short that you do not hear both shutter curtains engaging at the beginning and the end of the exposure. The front curtain opens up at the beginning of every exposure to let light in, whereas the rear curtain basically closes at the end of the exposure, blocking light from reaching the sensor. What is Electronic Front-Curtain Shutter?Ī typical mechanical focal-plane shutter is comprised of two curtains, known as “front curtain” and “rear curtain”. Let’s take a look at EFCS in more detail. However, if your camera has a feature called “Electronic Front-Curtain Shutter” (EFCS), you can eliminate blur from shutter shock completely in your images. So if your camera has a damped shutter mechanism and you are using relatively fast shutter speeds or very slow shutter speeds longer than 1 second, you should be able to avoid shutter shock in your images.


However, when the same image is viewed at 100% to reveal all the details as seen below from a high-resolution camera, it is clear that it looks quite blurry – individual leaves are all blotchy and the detail in tree branches is barely visible: Unfortunately, shutter shock can be observed on any camera that has a mechanical shutter mechanism, so it can happen on DSLRs, mirrorless cameras and even some point and shoot cameras.Īt web resolution, the image looks great when it is exported and sharpened in Lightroom. However, it turns out that the DSLR mirror is not the only source of camera shake that can cause blurry images – shutter shock originating from the shutter mechanism opening before the start of the exposure can be equally damaging under certain conditions. DSLR shooters are typically aware of the mirror mechanism potentially causing camera shake (also known as “mirror slap”), so when seeing blurry images in the field, they often use specific camera modes as “Mirror Up” or features such as “Exposure Delay Mode” in order to reduce or even eliminate camera shake from the mirror. While improper hand-holding techniques, tripod instability and wind are often blamed for blurry photographs, one source of camera shake is rarely thought of – and that is shutter shock. The latter, in particular, is a rather frustrating issue, because photographers often cannot properly determine the source of the issue. Lenses that resolved well in the past don’t seem to cut it anymore on high resolution cameras, computers need to be updated with beefier specifications to handle large RAW files, and camera shake has become much more noticeable in images when fully zoomed in. With the increase of camera resolution on modern digital cameras, we have seen a number of issues arise.

Shutter Shock and Its Effect on Image Quality Enabling EFCS on Sony Mirrorless Camerasġ.What is Electronic Front-Curtain Shutter?.Shutter Shock and Its Effect on Image Quality.
