the last word

Before I get too far into testing a camera, I do a series of exposures calculated to see if there are self-heating effects that might skew my test results. Since many of my tests involve making series of sequential exposures that are later subjected to statistical analysis, material self heating can force me to slow… [Read More]

The Sony a7S is unique among the alpha 7 series in that it has a fully electronic shutter option, called “silent mode”. Here’s the read noise histogram at ISO 400K with the shutter in silent mode and the drive mode set to single shot: The histogram is, to put it kindly, sparsely populated. At ISO… [Read More]

With the Sony a7 and a7R, I found that the bit-depth of the raw images was different when the camera was set in single-shot mode from when it was set in continuous (you hold down the shutter release and the camera takes pictures until you let go) mode. Would the a7S continue the pattern? You… [Read More]

it’s amazing what you can learn about a camera with the lens cap on. In this post, I’m going to talk about what happens when you set the shutter mode to single shot and use the electronic first curtain to open the shutter and the mechanical (probably Copal) shutter to close it. The shutter speed was… [Read More]