The Sony a6700’s Silent Mode: What It Gains and What It Costs

The Sony a6700‘s default shutter isn’t particularly quiet. I’ve been surprised at how loud it is — louder than it seems it should be.

If you’re out shooting landscapes on your own or out on the street in a bustling urban environment that’s not much of an issue. But it’s not great for birds or wildlife or performances, or just anywhere you don’t want to call extra attention to yourself.

So here’s how to switch the a6700 to use the electronic shutter and turn off other sounds.

You can do each of these steps separately, but the a6700 also has a convenient quick shortcut that does both in one setting. The result is that you can shoot silently, or at least close to it.

I say “close to it” here, because you might still hear some faint sounds from the lens, such as the aperture blades moving and the autofocus motor working. But with most lenses, especially newer Sony e-mount lenses (or Sigma lenses for this camera, which I’ve also used) they’re generally very quiet.

But it’s not all peaches and cream. There are downsides to shooting in silent mode that have nothing to do with it being quiet. It has to do with the way it does it.

The Sony a6700 has both a mechanical and electronic shutter.

By default, and for day-to-day regular use, it uses the mechanical shutter.

The mechanical shutter runs from 1/4000 second to 30 seconds, plus Bulb. The electronic shutter gets you an extra stop at the fast end — 1/8000 second — but it also stops at 30 seconds, and Bulb isn’t available with it.

The much quieter option is to switch to the electronic shutter.

If you engage the Silent Mode setting, it does two things:

1. Switches to the electronic shutter
2. Mutes all the other electronic feedback sounds the camera emits
   

I’ve been surprised at how loud the a6700’s mechanical shutter is. It seems like it’s much louder than it should be. It’s quite a clack, more like an old-school film SLR.

Where to find the Silent Mode setting on the Sony a6700

From the left side, go down to the red camera tab. Then go across to:

Shooting > [6] Shutter/Silent

Then across to:

Shooting > [6] Shutter/Silent > Silent Mode Settings

The Silent Mode option itself is pretty self-explanatory. It’s either On or Off (it’s set to off by default).

Written out, the full path is MENU → Shooting → Shutter/Silent → Silent Mode Settings → Silent Mode.

If you want to engage the silent mode, you obviously set it to On.

Target Function Settings

There’s a related section of the settings that isn’t really very self-explanatory; in fact, I found it a bit confusing. It’s called Target Function Settings.

Basically, this lets you specify exceptions to the Silent Mode. The reason is that some features can’t be silent, and you might want to still use those particular features. Specifically, this refers to Aperture Drive in AF and Auto Pixel Mapping.

If you use Aperture Drive in AF, it will prioritize auto-tracking performance, which is louder. With this setting, you have options for Focus Priority, Standard, or Silent Priority. So, by default, when you enable the Silent Mode setting above, the Aperture Drive in AF mode will switch to its Silent Priority setting. What the Target Function Settings allows you to do is override this setting specifically and choose Focus Priority or Standard instead.

The reason Auto Pixel Mapping setting is relevant here, and why it’s included in the Target Function Settings, is that using Auto Pixel Mapping involves automatically activating the shutter when you turn off the camera. It’s taking an image using the mechanical shutter so that it can detect any hot pixels on the sensor. But in using the mechanical shutter, it’s going to need to make some noise. So the reason it’s in the Target Function Settings section is that Silent Mode will, by default, turn off Auto Pixel Mapping. But you can override it here.

That also explains a sound that worries a lot of owners. With Auto Pixel Mapping left on, you’ll sometimes hear the shutter fire a moment after you switch the camera off. Sony’s manual says outright that this is normal and not a malfunction.

I also have a bunch of other posts on shooting with the Sony a6700, including how to adjust Auto ISO limits.

– Sony a6700 Sample Images / Image Quality Tests (general collection of sample images under a variety of conditions)
– Sony a6700 High ISO Sample Images (focusing on high-ISO images taken under low-light conditions)
– Sony a6700 High ISO Test Images (similar to above, but focused on sequences of images throughout ISO range for side-by-side comparison)

I also have a bunch of other posts on shooting with the Sony a6700.

Pros & cons of the Sony a6700’s Silent Mode and electronic shutter

The pros and cons of using Silent Mode are generally less directly about the noise it does or doesn’t make and more about the fact that going quiet means switching to the electronic shutter. And there are some limitations with the electronic shutter that are worth knowing about.¹

The pros of the electronic shutter are fairly straightforward:

• It’s silent. Or, when factoring in lens operations, nearly silent.
• It allows for some much faster shutter speeds. Up to 1/8000s compared with 1/4000s with the mechanical shutter.
• There’s no vibration caused by the physical movement of a shutter mechanism.
• It also doesn’t impose mechanical wear and tear on the shutter mechanism.

One thing the electronic shutter doesn’t buy you on the a6700 is a faster burst. The camera tops out at about 11 frames per second either way, and drops to about 10 fps if you’re shooting lossless-compressed RAW. If you’ve read that going electronic unlocks a higher frame rate, that’s true of stacked-sensor bodies, not this one.

So if the electronic shutter is so good, why not just leave it set on that all the time?

It’s because there are several drawbacks. Some relate specifically to the a6700; others are more generally related to the way electronic shutters work.

For instance, when you switch to the electronic shutter on the Sony a6700, some features and functions become unavailable. They include:

• Flash. Flash shooting isn’t available at all in Silent Mode — the flash won’t fire. With the mechanical shutter, the a6700 syncs flash up to 1/160s (you can use a slower speed, but not a faster one).
• Long exposure noise reduction. For shutter speeds of 1 second or longer, it applies heavier signal-to-noise filtering to output a cleaner image.
• Electronic Front Curtain Shutter (or e-Front Curtain Shut., as it’s called on the camera menu) isn’t available. This is a hybrid shutter method that reduces the shutter lag between pressing the shutter button and the shutter release (but comes with some downsides).
• BULB shooting. That is, you can’t just leave the shutter open manually for long star trails or extreme motion blur. The longest shutter speed available with the electronic shutter is 30 seconds.
• Anti-flicker shooting. This feature mitigates the effect of some artificial light sources such as LED lights or fluorescent.

Electronic shutters are also often prone to what is known as rolling shutter. This is when the scene is captured line by line, so with subjects moving quickly in the scene, they can become distorted as they’re captured.

On the a6700 that shows up in two ways. Pan quickly, or shoot something crossing the frame fast, and vertical lines lean over — buildings and poles come out looking slanted. Indoors, under LED or fluorescent lighting, you can also get bands of uneven brightness across the frame, because the light is flickering faster than the sensor reads out. Anti-flicker shooting is the usual answer to that banding, but it’s one of the features the electronic shutter turns off, so the only real fix is going back to the mechanical shutter.

Notes & References:

1. It’s worth noting here that not all electronic shutters are the same. I’m referring specifically to the shutter in the a6700 here. Some cameras, like the Nikon Z8, only have an electronic shutter, but it’s a more advanced design where some of the drawbacks of electronic shutters have been mitigated or overcome. [↩︎]