Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/19

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Subject: [Leica] RE: The M7d
From: Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 15:48:25 -0800
References: <NEBBJDFBIKOBILIKPPBNOEKAIIAA.red735i@earthlink.net>

I do respect your opinion on many things BD.

But just so you are a little more informed, digital sensors do "not" 
require a shutter The shutter is a pulse to the sensor substrate that, in 
lay terms, opens the pixels to collect light, then closes them. The pulse 
width determines the shutter speed. The camera shutter basically does 
nothing. Many cameras have "live" mode where the LCD on the back acts like 
a live viewfinder. To do this, the camera shutter, if there is one, is open 
in what we used to call "T" or Time exposure. Basically the shutter is 
simply out of the way. The sensor is in a decimation mode in that it only 
delivers every 4th pixel row and 4th column. This allows the image to be 
read out fast enough to update the LCD reasonably rapidly. The decimation 
is also to size the image down to the LCD size. Then when you push the 
"shutter release", you are simply sending a pulse to the sensor to capture 
the image, at full resolution, at whatever "shutter speed" has been 
selected. The shutter noise coming out of 99% of the digital cameras is a 
.wav file sent to a speaker in the camera.

Jim


At 03:48 PM 2/19/2002 -0500, B. D. Colen wrote:

>THAT is the proverbial $64K question. I was speaking with another LUGer the
>other day who speculated that PERHAPS the electronic shutter was being put
>in the M because that might then give Leica what it needed to produce what
>would amount to a digital back - imaging a digital capture unit that would
>fit into the back door area, with more electronics, etc. that would sit
>below the camera, a bit like the Kodak digitization of the Nikon F5 - If you
>didn't care about having a "traditional" LCD viewing screen, you might then
>have a digital rangefinder using M lenses...and there would be no reason why
>an LCD couldn't fit into the hot shoe, connected by a short cord to the
>bottom unit, which would allow viewing images as soon as they were taken.
>
>Just total, utter, speculation - and I know, Jim B., it would be a total
>piece of shit that would produce images unworthy of Leica - in fact they
>would be images unworthy of being called photographs of any kind. :-)
>
>B. D.

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Replies: Reply from Javier Perez <summarex@yahoo.com> (Re: [Leica] RE: The M7d)
Reply from Jim Brick <jim@brick.org> ([Leica] RE: RE: The M7d)
Reply from Jim Brick <jim@brick.org> ([Leica] Re: Shutters in digital cameras - was RE: RE: The M7d)
Reply from "Mike Durling" <durling@widomaker.com> (Re: [Leica] RE: The M7d)
In reply to: Message from "Frank Filippone" <red735i@earthlink.net> (RE: [Leica] The M7 (again!))