With all the fuss recently about the Sony A9 and its electronic shutter, I thought I would try out the one on my X-Pro 2. I had dabbled with it before, but I always thought it was a bit of an odd experience, so I didn’t really do much with it. I had also read various reports of it introducing rolling shutter effects, so I hadn’t paid it much attention. However, I was out doing some street photography the other day, and so I thought that I might as well give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised.

Actually, I first got the idea when in a church. There was a beautiful ornate side alter in front of me and I wanted to take a picture without disturbing the other people in the church, so I thought of trying the electronic shutter. First of all, switching to it was easy because I have it added to my quick menu. I’m not sure why and why I added to the quick menu, but that’s another conversation.

Incidentally, if you didn’t know this already, you can quickly customise the quick menu by pressing and holding the q button on the back of the camera. This works for all the customisable buttons.

Once I activated it, I then wanted to turn all the camera noises off. Even with the electronic shutter activated, by default, the camera still makes a lot of noise. To turn the sounds off you simply go into the setup (spanner) menu and then to the sound options. Form here you can set the autofocus beep to silent and the shutter noise to low or silent.

When you start shooting with the X-Pro2 in silent mode, it feels really weird. It’s like nothing is happening, but it is. On the street, this felt like a cloak of invisibility. I was taking pictures of people right in front of me, and they never noticed. I didn’t even think I was taking pictures. As for the results, I didn’t notice any rolling shutter artifacts, but I wasn’t really shooting any high speed subjects. For street shooting, it seems to work quite well, although I’ll need to do some more testing to see if there are no downsides.

Here are some results from my experimenting. They’re noting special, photographically speaking, but you also can’t tell the difference between the electronic shutter and the regular one. Images were processed using Capture One, and using my SilverLUX presets.

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