Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/09/24
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At 11:40 PM -0400 9/24/01, dante@umich.edu wrote:
>Merits of various designs as described by a Nikon historian - interesting
>connection between the shutter travel direction and optimization
>
>http://www.nikon.co.jp/main/eng/society/rhnc/rhnc11shut2-e.htm
>
>Even Nikon has endorsed the idea of vertical...
>
>on 9/24/01 8:20 PM, Frank Filippone at red735i@earthlink.net wrote:
>
>> The vertical shutters travels only 2/3 the distance that horizontal shutters
>> do..... therefore they could open and shut faster.... and give faster
>> shutter speeds..... That was the story when first introduced, recently...by
>> Copal or/and Seiko.
>>
>> The "artistic" argument of the vertical vs horiz shutter had to do with not
>> panning a horizontally moving object... say a bicycle.... and LONG exposures
>> makes it most obvious......with a slit shutter also is worse...
>>
>> The original (or one of the best known at least) vertical shutters was the
>> Zeiss Contax ... Marc, your cue......!
>>
>> Frank Filippone
>> red735i@earthlink.net
>>
>> --
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>
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When the Copal Square shutter came out, it was untested, and
Konishiroku was one of the few companies that had faith in it. This
was probably due to their own work in this area with their own
shutter, even though that wasn't particularly reliable. It took a
while for the Copal Square to catch on, due to some limitations (lots
of noise, not particularly light-tight) including uncertainty about
reliablility. The Copal Square shutters were rated for about 1/5 the
exposures that Nikon rated the then current F shutter for. Therefore
the F3 still got the horizontal shutter. The F4 got a vertical
shutter after Nikon had gotten some experience with vertical shutters
in further development of their own vertical shutters in the FE, FM
and especially the FE2 and FM2. It just took a while, and Nikon
wasn't interested in buying a third party shutter that was available
for other customers for their flagship camera.
Meanwhile, the Copal Square shutter had proven itself a lot more
durable than most people initially gave it credit for, and often was
more durable than the rest of the cameras they were installed in.
The Leica M shutters are at least an order of magnitude more durable
than the Copal Square, and a lot more durable than almost any other
shutter made today, in part due to its relatively slow speed and low
stress.
The 'artistic' argument of horizontal vs. vertical shutters was
initiated because of the old Graphic 4x5 cameras with focal plane
shutters that took a _long_ time to travel across the aperture. With
those you could get serious geometric distortion if shooting fast
moving objects, but those concerns are now more historical than real.
- --
* Henning J. Wulff
/|\ Wulff Photography & Design
/###\ mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
|[ ]| http://www.archiphoto.com
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