Electronic vs Mechanical shutter

Posted in Photography on April 7, 2025
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Can anybody explain when to use electronic shutter over mechanical shutter in Sony A7 IV? What are the advantages of each?

Sony Alpha India 770

Hi Sarajit, Thanks for your inquiry.

On Sony cameras, electronic shutter uses the sensor to control exposure, offering silent shooting and faster shutter speeds, while mechanical shutter uses physical blades, allowing for higher shutter speeds and potentially avoiding rolling shutter artifacts, but at the cost of noise and a lower maximum shutter speed.
Unlike a mechanical shutter, an electronic shutter doesn't have any moving parts. Instead, the image information is gathered from the sensor over the specified exposure time, which can be much shorter than any mechanism could support. The catch, however, is that for technical reasons such as electronic bandwidth, the sensor data cannot be saved all at once but must be read off sequentially, one line (or several lines) of pixels at a time, in much like the way a scanner head moves down the bed of a flatbed scanner. As a result, the "shutter speed" (that is, exposure time) can be much faster but the readout speed can introduce limitations, which are solved with the Sony processors and high speed memory cards. Sony has designed special sensor for electronic shutters to make them more efficient
For more information, we recommend watching Alpha Classroom episodes which are available for free at https://alphacommunity.in/the-alpha-classroom/

- April 9, 2025, 11:54 a.m.

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Sarajit Sil

Thanks a lot for this detailed information.

- April 14, 2025, 11:57 p.m.

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