GH3 electronic shutter

I've written about the electronic shutter feature of the Panasonic GH3 before, concluding that the feature is very useful, but has some side effects. The electronic shutter is useful since it is totally silent, and vibration free. However, the electronic shutter reads the image sequentially, row for row, rather slowly, taking about 1/10 second in total. If you move the camera during this time, you get odd wobbly effects, even with a very fast shutter speed. This is a rolling shutter artefact.

To illustrate this, I have superimposed two exposures in an animated GIF. They were taken with the Lumix G 14mm f/2.5 at f/4, 1/60s, ISO 200. Normally, one would think that 1/60 second is safe for handholding a shot with a wide angle lens, however, since each full exposure takes 1/10 second, any movement during the exposure will result in a skewed image:



Looking at only one of the two exposures above, one might not notice any problems. However, when seeing both, it is clear that at least one of them, probably both, are not geometrically correct. So, is this a problem? When holding the camera reasonably still during the exposure, and not photographing very square objects, it is no issue. If you critically need rectilinear images, then you are better off using the normal mechanical shutter.