Shutter Lag / Cycle Times
When you press the shutter release on a camera, there's usually a delay or
lag time before the shutter actually fires. This time allows the autofocus
and autoexposure mechanisms time to do their work and can amount to a fairly
long delay in some situations. Since this number is rarely reported on, and
can significantly affect the picture taking experience, I now routinely measure
it, using a custom test system I designed and constructed for the purpose.
Nikon D2H Timings
Operation
Time (secs)
Notes
Power On -> First
shot
0.16
Startup is very
fast. Given how the on-switch of the D2H works, it was
difficult to insure that I started the timing exactly as the
power switch was activated. As a result, the standard deviation
of the startup times I measured was fully 22% of the average
shown at right. Regardless of this though the D2H is clearly
the fastest-starting camera I've tested to date.
Shutdown
0 - 120
There's no lens to
retract as with many consumer-level cameras, so "shutdown"
from quiescent state is nothing more than turning the power
switch off. Depending on memory card speed, the number of
shots in the buffer, and the speed of the memory card though,
it could take as long as two minutes for the camera to finish
writing to the memory card.
Play to Record, first
shot
0.271
The D2H is a "shooting
priority" camera, meaning that it's basically always
ready to shoot. The time shown at left is the delay between
pressing the shutter button when the camera is in playback
mode, and it actually capturing the shot. Extremely fast.
Record to play (max
res)
1.19
Time for a large/fine
image to appear on the rear-panel LCD, after pressing the
playback button. Very fast.
Shutter lag, full
autofocus
0.049-0.456
Shutter lag in full
autofocus mode will depend a fair bit on the lens being used.
These numbers therefore only indicate a range that you might
expect. The shortest time shown was measured with the 12-24mm
wide-angle zoom lens set to the 12mm focal length. The longest
time shown was measured with the 105mm f/2.8 macro lens attached.
(The shortest time here is very, very fast.)
Shutter lag, manual
focus
0.046
Very, very fast,
the shortest manual-focus shutter lag I've measured to date.
(Essentially the same as the extremely fast shutter lag shown
below for the prefocused test condition.)
Shutter lag, prefocus
0.045
Very, very fast,
the shortest prefocused shutter lag I've measured to date.
Cycle time, large/fine
files
0.25
Extremely fast, the
camera could capture images about as fast as my finger could
press the shutter button. Also, the camera captured a huge
number of shots before slowing. (Way more than the 20-40 shot
buffer would suggest, as the camera/flash card combination
evidently kept up with the shooting rate pretty well.)
Cycle time, small/basic
files
0.21
The same as above,
my finger wasn't any faster than the camera.
Cycle time, TIFF/NEF
files
0.22/11.1
Extremely fast, the
camera didn't slow to the ~11 second/frame rate until I'd
shot 25 images. Buffer clearing times are really long in
this mode though, fully 248 seconds with a fast Lexar 40x
CF card.
High-Speed Continuous
mode, all file formats
0.124
(8.03 fps)
No question about
it, the D2H is blazingly fast in continuous mode! It achieves
this frame rate in all modes and file formats, the only difference
being in how long it takes the buffer to clear. Buffer-clear
times are 248 seconds with the TIFF file format, 46.7 seconds
with uncompressed NEF, 31.8 with compressed NEF, and 27.5
with large/fine JPEG. (All times were measured with a 4 GB,
40x Lexar memory card, slower cards would result in proportionately
longer clearing times.
Any way you slice it, the D2H is a blazingly fast camera. Shutter lag
is the fastest I've measured on any camera to date, at an astonishing
~45 milliseconds (0.045 seconds). Cycle times are equally amazing,
at roughly 0.25 seconds in single-shot mode, and 0.124 seconds in high-speed
continuous mode. The camera also has an unusually deep buffer, with
a capacity that ranges from 24 to 40 frames, depending on the file format
selected. The camera also takes good advantage of fast memory cards
like the 4 gigabyte(!) 40x Lexar card the performance numbers above
are based on. (Just for comparison's sake, while the D2H emptied a full
buffer of uncompressed NEF files to the 40x Lexar card in 46.7 seconds,
it took fully 140 seconds for it to dump a full buffer to an old, slow
1GB card by another manufacturer. - The speedup of the 40x card is clearly
nowhere near a full 40x in this case, due to the time required for the
camera itself to process the images, but the difference is dramatic
enough that you'll certainly want to use seriously fast memory card
with the D2H.)
