On Apr 10, 2005, at 2:53 AM, Don Sanderson wrote:
From what I was able to see my Olympus C5050 simply stopped down and captured the image. With the aperture wide open I could see the sensor thru the lens the whole time the exposure was being made. At no time did the iris close. The 5050 is a prosumer grade, far from a simple camera. ...
The Olympus C5050 indeed does have a mechanical shutter. I borrowed one for a short time and had a C8080WZ for a while. Both have a mechanical leaf shutter. Both also support interline transfer for motion capture. One of my points of curiosity about any camera is to see the shutter operate ... If you shine a light down the lens and watch you can see it operate; you can also hear it (with all the stupid shutter emulation sounds turned off, of course ;-). Sometimes it is a little hard to see since the iris and shutter mechanisms in these cameras is so small.
Bob's statement is not entirely correct and somewhat misleading. Just because SLR sensors do not have interline transfer mode and require a shutter does not imply that small sensor camera CCDs use interline transfer for all exposure timing operations.
Godfrey
