How Quiet Are Leica Shutters?

Spend any amount of time on a photography forum, and you'll eventually read a remark much like "Leica rangefinder cameras have the quietest shutter ever!" When I first had a chance to shoot one, I was eager to near the lack of sound it was about to make. When the moment came and I slowly squeezed the shutter button until. . . *click*. I wasn't that impressed. Of course, I had been shooting with cameras that had leaf shutters for a few years before that moment, and they all had pretty much the same amount of quiet in them when the shutter was clicked, so the silent operation was something I was already accustomed to, thus, the magic moment wasn't so magic for me.

However, the M3 has a focal plane shutter, not a leaf shutter, and focal plane shutters can tend to be noisy buggers for sure. The best example of this in my own experience was the last time I ever took my Nikon FE out to shoot an event with people. Every time I would fire off a shot, a young boy standing nearby in front of me would flinch from the mirror slap, and then turn around and shoot me an evil eye. He eventually asked me if my camera was broken or something because it made so much noise every time I took a photo. If I was coming right out of this experience, and had never owned another camera with a leaf shutter when I first heard the Leica, I probably would have went "Whoa!" for sure. It is defiantly quieter then any focal plane shutter camera that I've used before.

So as an act of goodwill to all the people out there still shooting with SLRs, and have never had to the chance to hear the Leica shutters, I'm presenting this 'Shoutoff.' I took the four cameras I have in my possession that have focal plane shutters, and recorded each one at 1/1000th of a second, & 1/15th of a second and mixed them all together in one convenient mp3.

The four contenders in this experiment are my 4x5 Anniversary Speed Graphic, my Nikon FE, a Minolta SRT101 that a friend bought for $5 at a rummage sale and then gave to me, and my Leica M3. The narration is provided by the talented Lauren over at the AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech program.

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