I never knew shutter shock could be so bad.

ancient_mariner

ancient_mariner

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Just picked up a used Oly 40-150 for the wife's Olympus E-M10 (thanks @doggel) and couldn't understand why almost every image looked like it had terrible camera shake, even with shutter speeds at 1/320 or 1/400 - sure my technique isn't perfect, but it's not THAT bad.

A quick google found a thread on DPReview on the subject, the answer being to use the electronic shutter, turned on in menu list E, setting shutter delay by the diamond symbol to 0 IIRC. Suddenly I've got mostly non-blurry images. This probably explains why I've always thought the 14-42 EZ lens to be complete poo, and had been surprised at the odd unpredictably sharp image it produced - the longer focal length of this lens took it from being 'poor' to 'big problem'. Live & learn.

Hope someone finds this useful if they're puzzled about getting lousy images using M43.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Just picked up a used Oly 40-150 for the wife's Olympus E-M10 (thanks @doggel) and couldn't understand why almost every image looked like it had terrible camera shake, even with shutter speeds at 1/320 or 1/400 - sure my technique isn't perfect, but it's not THAT bad.

A quick google found a thread on DPReview on the subject, the answer being to use the electronic shutter, turned on in menu list E, setting shutter delay by the diamond symbol to 0 IIRC. Suddenly I've got mostly non-blurry images. This probably explains why I've always thought the 14-42 EZ lens to be complete poo, and had been surprised at the odd unpredictably sharp image it produced - the longer focal length of this lens took it from being 'poor' to 'big problem'. Live & learn.

Hope someone finds this useful if they're puzzled about getting lousy images using M43.
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I had this with my EM5-II, sent it back for a replacement and never saw shutter shock again (always used full mechanical shutter). I can only assume that some cameras suffer more than others and I would advise anyone who gets consistent/frequent shutter shock to exchange their camera if they can as the next camera might be fine.
 
It's WAY too late now (had it used over a year) and I wonder if this is the real reason why it was sold on, knowingly or otherwise. Seems it's not at all unusual though.
 
Shutter shock is a major problem for mirrorless cameras with mechanical shutters, made worse by light-weight bodies. Because the sensor is used for viewing, first the shutter has to close, then re-open to start the exposure, close to end it, then re-open again to restore viewing. So they might not have a mirror flapping about, but the shutter clunking up and down can be just as bad - or worse in some cases, and noisy with it. I used a Sony A7R that was so bad it needed 1 kilo of lead bolting to the base-plate if you wanted to get anywhere near maxxing out the sensor (as detailed on Diglloyd https://diglloyd.com/prem/s/ALLVIEW/SonyFullFrame/shutter-vibration-mitigating.html ).

Electronic first curtain gets around all this, pretty much essential for mirrorless IMHO
 
My Oly cameras with the 40-150 kit lens all display bad shutter shock at 1/320 which is a shame as that is the SS auto-ISO defaults to.

With that lens I switch to shutter priority and either drop SS a stop (fine for static subjects) or raise it, both alleviate shutter shock.
 
I've used MFT since the beginning but I never saw shutter shock with my GF1, G1 or GX7 until I bought a G7 and it came with a 14-42mm MEGA OIS lens and suddenly I got disappointing pictures with that lens on my GX7. At first I just put it down to the kit lens being a piece of junk but when I tried it on my G1 I got very good results from wide open and this made me suspicious so I began to look into the problem. It took me a while and some Googling to begin to understand what was happening and I'm still not 100% sure but as far as I can tell to be affected by shutter shock you need to use the mechanical shutter and...

- Use a body capable of inducing it.
- Use a lens susceptible to it.
- Shoot within a certain shutter speed range, maybe 1/80 to 1/350 or so.

I also suspect that the angle you hold the camera and lens at might have something to do with it too but to be honest I gave up testing.

I think this issue is a real shame and I do think that the manufacturers should have identified this issue and stopped it... shipping affected bodies together with affected lenses is IMO a damn disgrace.

The Panasonic 14-42mm MEGA OIS is a very nice lens when shutter shock isn't an issue, ditto the GX7 and G7 cameras. I took my GX7 out yesterday with the Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 fitted and I'm very very happy with the results.

I wouldn't recommend any shutter shock affected bodies unless the buyer goes into this very much with their eyes open. One thing I would like is a list of affected body and lens combinations but I've never found one.

PS.
Switching to the electronic shutter isn't a fix as it can bring its own problems. Rolling shutter effects don't bother me but the potential for banding under flickering lights does and the chances are that if a shot is affected it's unrecoverable... by me anyway.

HoppyUK said:
Shutter shock is a major problem for mirrorless cameras with mechanical shutters,
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It's not just a problem with CSC's though is it? I'm certain I've read reports on line of it affecting certain Nikon body and lens combinations.
 
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Shutter shock has become a newsworthy item after some cameras suffered badly from it in rather obvious ways. I suspect in most DSLRs it's been a rather slight and mostly negligible problem -- but obvious under certain circumstances. When I started using a 500mm mirror lens with my DSLRs I discovered that I needed to keep shutter speeds above 1/250th-1/300th of a second to get the sharpest images, even on a tripod. I put this down to mirror shock, and annoyingly my cameras didn't have a mirror lock up or a delay which could be set between raising the mirror and exposing. Why not? Because the manufacturers said they'd improved mirror movement control to the point where that was no longer necessary. Oh yeah?

The symptoms as I decreased shutter speed below the threshold were first of all a ghost image a few pixels displaced vertically from the main image. As I kept decreasing shutter speed that turned into a smear between the two images, then a simple vertical blur which gradually broadened out into a general blur of a few pixels in all directions. Exactly what would be expected from a sudden mechanical shock causing a vibration. Also hard to distinguish from simple camera shake or slightly missed focus, which are also problems with 500mm lenses.

Of course a 500mm mirror lens would exaggerate any mirror shock problems because it's both much shorter and much lighter than a 500mm refractor lens, reducing both the inertial mass, and rather importantly, the rotational inertia, so that any camera shake would cause more shift in the image during the exposure. I tried using two tripods, one bolted to the lens, one to the camera. No improvement. I tried weighting the camera and lens firmly down on a rock. No improvement.

Then I upgraded to a 24MP camera which had no moving mirror, plus both the old fashioned mechanical shutter and an electronic first curtain shutter. The mechanical or electronic first shutter curtain was a menu selectable option. Experimenting with the 500mm mirror lens with this camera I discovered to my surprise that I could still get exactly the same vertically displaced ghost image and blurring as the shutter speeds decreased at the same ranges of shutter speeds as my two previous DSLRs. But it was the mechanical first curtain shutter which was doing it. I could simply switch it on and off by switching between mechanical and electronic first curtain. What's more, with electronic first curtain on, I could get really sharp images on a tripod with shutter speeds down to 1/4 second -- possibly more, but that was as far down as I was easily able to test.

So the problem with my two previous DSLRs, a Sony A350 and A500, hadn't been mirror shock, it had been shutter shock. Sony had been quite correct in saying they had removed mirror shock from those DSLRs. But to make the slight amount of shutter shock obvious I had had to exaggerate its effect by using a peculiarly short and light 500mm lens, a 500mm reflex lens. I had also been using crop sensor DSLRs of 12 & 14MP, and getting only a few pixels of blur due to shutter shock. With a "full frame" film SLR I would never have been able to notice that.
 
woof woof said:
It's not just a problem with CSC's though is it? I'm certain I've read reports on line of it affecting certain Nikon body and lens combinations.
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I believe my D610 does it too sometimes, though it's seldom with the lenses I use and because of the relatively large image/low magnification much less obvious: really a non-issue for me. But I'd see the SS as an absolutely huge flaw that was simply not discussed enough (covered up by users who didn't want to look like they'd made a mistake?).
 
woof woof said:
<snip>
PS.
Switching to the electronic shutter isn't a fix as it can bring its own problems. Rolling shutter effects don't bother me but the potential for banding under flickering lights does and the chances are that if a shot is affected it's unrecoverable... by me anyway.
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True, though Sony has shown with the A9 that these problems can be minimised and I'm sure they will be properly fixed quite soon now, along with reduced dynamic range that also seems to be an issue. The A9 is the first mirrorless to knock any kind of nail in the DSLRs coffin IMHO, but more will surely follow soon. I think we're heading for a show-down with Sony and Canon, when they release a full-frame mirrorless. Canon currently has a global electronic shutter as an option in one of it's high-end video cameras, though it's expensive and also has reduced dynamic range I believe. The telling moment will be when we have a camera with no mechanical shutter (y)

It's not just a problem with CSC's though is it? I'm certain I've read reports on line of it affecting certain Nikon body and lens combinations.
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With any fast-moving components, there is vibration and shock. The main problem with DSLRs is the mirror, though that can be minimised with damping mechanisms and it's something we've learned to live with and work around, being quite predictable and always around 1/4 - 1/20sec kind of range. The main problem with mirrorless is the closing of the shutter before the exposure begins, which cannot be damped and sets up a high-frequency vibration that effects commonly used shutter speeds.
 
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Pentax 67, anyone? ;)
 
ancient_mariner said:
Just picked up a used Oly 40-150 ...almost every image looked like it had terrible camera shake....I've always thought the 14-42 EZ lens to be complete poo,
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Very very interesting- I never experienced anything like that with that 40-150 (or indeed with my 14-42 EZ lens) on the Pen E-5 or Pen F. In fact even though the 14-42 is pretty much redundant since I got my 12-40 Pro, I am reluctant to part with as it performs so well for me.
 
doggel said:
Very very interesting- I never experienced anything like that with that 40-150 (or indeed with my 14-42 EZ lens) on the Pen E-5 or Pen F. In fact even though the 14-42 is pretty much redundant since I got my 12-40 Pro, I am reluctant to part with as it performs so well for me.
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If you have a camera and lens combination that's susceptible to shutter shock but you don't see it it's possible that you're not because you're not shooting in the affected shutter speed range. Up here in the dull North I could be shooting at 1/100 in broad daylight but I do believe that other parts of the world get a little more light :D
 
ancient_mariner said:
It's WAY too late now (had it used over a year) and I wonder if this is the real reason why it was sold on, knowingly or otherwise. Seems it's not at all unusual though.
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At least we have the anti-shock mode which has only the small possibility of artefacts, unlike full electronic.
 
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