Continuous shooting with electronic shutter

[scott kirkpatrick]

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Here's a fun fact:  The electronic shutter that became available in firmware 3.0 runs faster in continuous mode than does the mechanical shutter.  I wondered, so I ran a test.  With the drive mode set to highest speed continuous, DNG only, and electronic shutter, I got 32 shots off in 2.6 seconds before things slowed down due to the buffer filling up.  That's 12 frames per second on average.  With the mechanical shutter I could take 34 shots in 3.4 seconds before the buffer filled.  That's 10 frames per second.  In either case, it took 40 seconds to drain the whole buffer to my SDXC card.  I was using a 150 Mbps Lexar1000 UHS-II 64 GB card. Josh Lehrer at Reddotforum reports 28 seconds to write out a whole SL buffer to a faster card, a Sandisk 280 MBps UHS-II 32GB.  Obviously, this sort of performance will depend on the cards you use.  If you want to take pictures of some continuous motion (think a golf swing), it appears that the first two shots in a burst have a little stutter -- different intervals, after which things settle down.  So it is better to start the burst a bit early to get a smooth series.

 

scott