Rolling shutters, jell-o-cam, anybody who’s serious about video production and using SLRs or even high-end cinema cameras should be familiar with the effects of rolling shutters. Even if you’re not, if you’ve ever watched a video that has an airplane’s propeller in it and it’s anything but straight, then you’ve seen the effect of a rolling shutter.

Back in 2011, Zacuto rounded up a number of industry players and put the state of the art, at the time, of cameras to the test. These included things like the Red One, Arri Alexa, Sony F-35 on the high end, and a number of more approachable VDSLRs like Canon’s 5D Mk II, 7D, 1D Mark IV, and Nikon’s D7000. Their final segment of the 3-part series included tests for rolling shutter performance.

They used two test mechanisms, a drum with vertical lines and a rotating disk. Combined they simulate pretty much all the cases you run into with rolling shutter. The drum covers panning and the disk covering rapidly rotating objects, like a plane’s propeller.

I’ve replicated them in a fashion, though this is spit-and-bailing wire engineering at its finest. Both tests are powered by my trusty DeWalt cordless drill motor rotating somewhere between 0 and 450RPM. The disk test used a circle of black matte board with some white gaffer tape strips placed across it, the line test used an old zip-tie container (so old in fact I broke it trying to put a hole in it), wrapped in white paper with strips of black gaffer tape added for lines.

Like I said, these aren’t strictly scientific tests, due to breaking and an off center hole, my drum test is considerably more wobbly than it could be, and I have no idea at what RPM I’m actually spinning at. Both tests were shot with a 1/500^th shutter. At 1/60^th, there was way too much motion blur that the disk became essentially gray instead of having distinct lines. The 5D shots are at f/4 ISO 800, the EOS M at f/5.6 ISO 1600 due to the lenses used.

That said, not having done this in nearly as much of a high tech & controlled manner as the Zacuto team did, I don’t think you can readily compare my results to theirs.