Selftimer or cable release for group shots, which one do you trust?

I used to swear by my old mechanical selftimer on my Pentax Spotmatic, even after it started skipping past the 10 second mark around 2019, but now I rig up a basic cable release and just hold it off to the side for family gatherings. The selftimer kept giving me blurred shots because the mirror slap would hit right as the timer fired, so I switched after a wedding in Portland where every single table photo came out soft. Are you guys still trusting those clunky timers on vintage bodies, or did you switch to something like a remote cord or even just setting the camera on a 2 second delay when your hands are too shaky?

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river_hart1820d agoMost Upvoted

That 2019 skip on my Spotmatic finally pushed me over the edge too, after a decade of fighting it at every family reunion. I grabbed a basic cable release from a pawn shop for five bucks and never looked back, though I still keep the self timer for solo shots when I can prop the camera on a rock. The mirror slap is the real killer, so anything that lets me trigger the shutter without touching the body beats waiting for that weird mechanical guess every time.