Why can a time-lapse still flicker in full manual exposure?

Yes — time-lapse flicker can still happen even with manual exposure, because exposure settings aren’t the only variables that can change between frames.

From the answers, common causes are camera features that still adapt shot-to-shot unless explicitly disabled, such as:

• auto white balance
• auto ISO
• autofocus
• Auto Lighting Optimizer / Highlight Tone Priority / similar dynamic processing

Any of these can make consecutive frames differ slightly in brightness or color, which becomes obvious in a time-lapse.

It’s also worth checking whether the flicker is already present in the still images themselves by stepping through them manually. If the stills look stable but the video flickers, the issue may be in how the video was assembled rather than in capture.

So the short explanation is: manual mode fixes exposure parameters, but not necessarily every other camera process that affects frame-to-frame consistency. For time-lapse, lock down all automatic image and focus settings, and verify the source frames before blaming the edit/export stage.