Is there a theoretical maximum at which a shutter cannot go faster (aside from the speed of light :-))?
Is there a camera which has the fastest shutter speed? What is the advantage of this?
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Sign up to join this communityIs there a theoretical maximum at which a shutter cannot go faster (aside from the speed of light :-))?
Is there a camera which has the fastest shutter speed? What is the advantage of this?
If you are not limiting the question to mechanical shutter, the fastest shutter speed I ever saw in a machine vision camera was 1 micro second, taking pictures at 775.000 frames/s. The advantage is to analyse high speed actions, like grains flying fast in during processing, studying physics, tennis balls hitting rackets, other types of impact. To achive blazing fast FPS you need a shutter to match. 25fps needs a max shutter length below 40ms. 100 fps needs less than 10ms etc. Also looking at the sun, burning things and solder actions, lasers without ND filters could be applications, but then you need to evaluate if it is a problem to use ND filters instead of using a $100.000 camera.
There is no fastest speed shutter. The fastest theoretically possible would be the time it takes for however many photons you want to capture to hit the sensor. The advantage is that it stops motion. You can see what happened during a very small moment in time and thus a very fast action. The trick is to have sufficient light though. You need sufficient photos to strike the sensor during the exposure in order to be able to make out the details of what you are looking at.
The amount of light you need increases proportionally to the shutter speed with a fixed factor of the sensitivity of the sensor. Each time the speed of the shutter gets twice as fast, you need twice as much light for a given sensor to be able to expose an image. This leads to practical limits with existing technology, but there is no particular physical limitation to shutter speed given enough light and a fast enough sensor.
I'd like to point out that a shutter is not a neat "on," "off" thing. The shutter speed is an indication of the exposure duration, only, from half open to half closed. The "halfway point" is called "half-peak" by some.
In other words, the shutter takes time to get from fully closed to it's fullest opening, remain at it's fullest opening, and time to get the shutter from it's open position, back to it's fully closed position.
Then, there's the question of accuracy, and repeatability to the indicated setting. Apertures can be exact whereas shutter speeds rarely are.