Measuring Shutter Speed Mechanically

I recently came across a video - featuring  Kamerastore - that has over 2 MILLION views on YouTube!

It's from the channel 'Smarter Every Day', founded by Destin who is on a journey to 'explore the world through science'. He shoots film and inevitably made his way to Finland to see the Kamerastore set-up for himself.

Why I love it

The video is an excellent demonstration of why we were so thrilled to partner with Kamerastore on an initial range of vintage film cameras in 2023 😅 Destin is blown away by the demonstration from Ari - a member of the Leica repair team - showing how to mechanically check shutter speeds.

The background being that when camera manufacturers (like Leica) were first making cameras that shoot at speeds approaching 1/1000 seconds - how could they check that they were accurate? You can't set a stopwatch that fast, and in the 1920s there was no digital means to check.

But if you spent the equivalent of an annual salary on the latest camera, you wouldn't want to have to buy film and pay for development to test yourself! You would want to trust the results straight away.

I won't ruin the details - but if you're interested in the mechanics of cameras then please enjoy the reveal.

But the video also gives a sneak peek of the Kamerastore operation, and the level of expertise that the team bring to every one of their camera checks. At one point Destin meets an engineer who qualified as a camera repair technician before the owner of Kamerastore was even born!

The attention to detail

Clearly the mechanical means are not always going to be faster or more accurate than digital machines. The team have pulled together a review of exactly how many ways they test shutter speeds: How Accurate is your Film Camera?

And this is just one of the tests they do! Incredible.