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Canon 5D Mark III announced, your thoughts

bensonga

Well-known member
Sometimes, it's the little things that make the biggest difference. Tripping the the shutter on my 1D Mk2 is a real pleasure....I just wish it delivered more than 8mp in the process! ;-)
 

Don Ellis

Member
Fair enough, I know if I didn't like the shutter sound, that would also annoy me like crazy! Good luck on the quest!
I love the "silent shutter" on the Mark III -- it's not totally silent, of course, but very soft in comparison to the normal shutter sound ... on the Mark III and on other DSLRs I've heard.

The silent shutter setting chops the continuous frame rate from 6fps to 3fps, but I ran a 15-second test on both normal shutter and silent shutter and they came out about equal at 42 shots of RAW+JPG. Sort of the hare-and-the-tortoise story, I guess.

Don
 

etrigan63

Active member
Don,
I am keenly interested in the "silent shutter" option of the 5DMk3. My D700 sounds like a .38 pistol being fired when I am shooting professional ballet and it has gotten me banned from a couple of venues. I was looking at the D800, but the high-ISO images don't buy me much over my D700. The high-ISO that I have seen from the 5DMk3 impresses and I may jump ship as I only have two lenses on my Nikon (24-70/2.8 & 70-200/2.8). How is manual focus confirmation achieved?
 

Don Ellis

Member
Hmm ... good question. I never thought about a confirmation. On manual focus I just focus until things are in focus and then fire. :)

Perhaps I'm missing something in the camera, or in other cameras, or in your question. I'll help if I can.

Edit: I just recorded the two -- five shots each with a pause between them (loud one first, but I would hope you could tell). :) The camera was about 18 inches away from the iPhone. In real life, it sounds even quieter (to me). And there is one slightly quieter mode: you can set it for Live View with Mode 2. What this does is allow you to depress the shutter to take the photo (in which you get half the soft sound) and keep the shutter depressed until you want to hear the other half of the soft sound). Having said that, I think that the picture on the LiveView would be very distracting to those around you, so I wouldn't use it myself.

http://www.kleptography.com/dl/5diii/5d3_shutter.aiff
 
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etrigan63

Active member
Thanks Don! The sound file is much appreciated. Bringing the file up in Audacity and looking at the waveforms gives the following results:

Regular shutter:


Silent Shutter:



In this unscientific analysis you can see that while the peak noise is actual quieter on the regular shutter (-44 db vs -41 db), the pitch of the peak noise is much, much higher (~10 kHz vs. ~20 kHz) where 22kHz is about the highest pitch a average person can hear. So what Canon has done is made the loudest bits much higher pitch and therefore harder to hear.

You can also see that the average loudness of the silent shutter is much lower than the regular shutter.

Keep in mind the the decibel (db) scale is logarithmic: -41 db is 2x louder than -42 db which is 2x louder than -43 db, etc, etc.
 

DaveS

Active member
Very interesting, I am also interested in the silent shutter mode for event photography. This feature caught my eye (ear?) early on.

(Just a quick technical update, the db scale is log based, but actually 3db is about 2x. So 3 db is 2x, and 6db is 2x again, so = 4x etc. 10db is 10x.) (From my sound engineering days.)

Dave
 

etrigan63

Active member
I stand happily corrected. By that note, the silent mode (based on the sample provided me) is actually twice as loud as regular mode (at peak) but it is near the upper edge of human hearing.

To quote Lex Luthor: "only kryptonians and creatures with 4 legs can hear this..."
 

Don Ellis

Member
Thank you both for your extra trouble and the information. If you just asked me about the volume of the silent shutter, I would say it sounds about half that of the normal shutter. It's really quite a pleasant, satisfying sound in real life.
 
M

Melilot29

Guest
It has amazing specifications. However, it is a little out of my reach so i will try to wait something better to come up or try to gather enough money for it.
 
I stand happily corrected. By that note, the silent mode (based on the sample provided me) is actually twice as loud as regular mode (at peak) but it is near the upper edge of human hearing.
That peak is well beyond the hearing limit of anyone but very young children. And even for them, in that octave hearing response is down many decibels from what it is at 1k.

The only caveat is that silent mode is probably louder to your dog.
 
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