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In what is being billed as another sizeable revolution in the camera world, Panasonic is set to unveil a shutterless DSLR.

Billed as a 'global shutter' and marketed as HD Progressive, Panasonic will for now reserve this feature only for their high end range of camcorders and the GH2.

Panasonic is set to release the LX4 and G2 in February, but the GH2 will wait until the 2nd half of 2010 according to my source in Asia. Rather than do a yearly update of the GH line, Panasonic want to bring a greater incremental step to the 'luxury' line.

My source confirmed that Panasonic's strategy was to divert investment into the development of a global shutter so that they could save money in both R&D and manufacturing costs of the mechanical shutter, a part which was developed because it was required for the original G1, GF1 and GH1 cameras.

A smart move by Panasonic and one which I hope Canon will emulate, although they will have a more challenging job on their hands due to the much larger size of the full-frame sensor in the 5D Mark II.

The global shutter also creates the possibility of an entirely silent camera. Goodbye shutter click.

On a DSLR a global shutter requires greater power demands and causes the sensor to run hot, but Panasonic were able to develop one because their modern CMOS processing plant can shrink a chip below 35 nanometers, which coupled with the relatively small (in DSLR terms) sensor size of the Micro 4/3rds format allows the chip to run cooler.

Previously digital cameras like the GH1 and 5D Mark II used a combination of a mechanical shutter and an electronic one. For example an electronic shutter is active in live view & video recording mode on Canon EOS cameras in video mode, to produce exposures required for video frames without any mechanical parts.

But cameras had been unable to use a entirely digital shutter for various reasons... For one, sensors were not capable of outputting the whole image in one moment (rather than line by line over a very short period of time) at high enough resolutions for still photos... so a mechanical shutter was required for the exposure. Also crucially, without a mechanical shutter and with an image read out line by line, any movement in the scene whilst the exposure was being taken would produce a vertical skew in the photo. As well as effecting video mode on the top of the range DSLRs like the 5D Mark II, this phenomena of the electronic shutter can also be seen in some cheap CMOS digital compacts which use an electronic shutter for still photos.

I always wondered why I have a few buses and trains which seem to be leaning back in my photo archive from 2001!