Measuring camera sensor readout speeds
I measured the sensor readout speeds of a Z50, Z50II, and Z8 when shooting photographs with electronic shutter.
I did this because I haven’t seen any information online about the Z50II’s sensor readout speed. I found that it’s exactly the same as the Z30 and Z50, about 1/22 second. Interestingly, Thom Hogan, my go-to reviewer for Nikon, seems to have the wrong readout time listed for the Z50 on his sensor read-out speeds page.
I used an Arduino Uno R3 and the technique from https://github.com/horshack-dpreview/RollingShutter with slightly modified hardware and source code. Instead of blinking the onboard LED, which is kind of dim, I blinked a discrete LED connected to pin 3. The LED’s dome focuses the light, yielding a much more reasonable exposure.
I photographed a 500 Hz LED with a 105mm macro lens at 1/4000, f/2.8, ISO 12800, and sanity checked its blink rate by calibrating using the Z8, which has a widely known readout speed of about 1/270 second. These are the photos from each camera - the Z50, then the Z50II, then the Z8. It’s neat to have such a stark visual representation of how much faster a stacked sensor is read.
