Nikon D70

Shutter Lag / Cycle Times

When you press the shutter release on a camera, there's usually a 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 even less often reported accurately), and can significantly affect the picture taking experience, I now routinely measure it, using a custom test system I built for the purpose, accurate to 0.001 second.

Along with its other excellent features, the D70 is a fast and responsive performer. Most impressive of course, is its continuous-mode speed and loooong burst lengths (with appropriately fast memory cards). With many cameras in the past, really fast memory cards often made a difference only in buffer-clearing speed, not so much in burst length or shot to shot cycle time. With the D70 though, we finally have a camera that can really take advantage of fast cards. With a card rated 60x or so, it can actually shoot at 3 frames/second (fps) in large/normal mode without stopping, until the memory card is filled. Even with slightly slower cards in the range of 24-40x, it shows surprisingly long burst capability and surprisingly fast post-buffer-fill speed. Shooting with a 40x Lexar card, I found that I could get off 21 large/fine JPEGs before the speed dropped below ~3 fps (2.92 fps by actual measurement), and even then, the decrease in performance was very modest, with the frame rate dropping only to 2.3 fps.

To make the most of the D70 though, you really do want to have as fast a memory card as you can afford. With an old, slow non-speed-rated card, I found the buffer capacity to be "only" 9 frames (still pretty good), and the post-buffer cycle time to be a sluggish 4.7 seconds/frame. Take my advice, and buy a good, fast card to use with your D70. It's an accessory that you'll be living with for a long time, and it can make a huge impact on the camera's responsiveness.

Startup time is another area where the D100 really blows past the competition. Try as I might, I really couldn't measure any startup delay. Bottom line, the D70 can get ready to shoot a picture at least as fast as you can.

Shutter response was fast but not blazingly so, actually coming in a bit behind the previous D100 in this category, and slightly behind the Digital Rebel as well. Manual-focus and pre-focus lag times were 0.157 and 0.124 seconds, respectively. This isn't bad (and is a good bit faster than the Digital Rebel), but is a notch slower than the D100's 0.100 seconds, and well off the mark of Nikon's own higher-end products. Here's a brief table, comparing the performance of the D70 with that of the Digital Rebel, the original D100, and Canon's EOS-10D:

Overall, the four come in fairly close to each other, with the D70 and Rebel being slower than the other two in terms of AF lag. The huge differences with the D70 are in its effectively zero startup delay, and in its amazing buffer capacity. The impact of the D70's buffer performance was subtle but dramatic. (If that's not an oxymoron.) It wasn't so much something that I was particularly aware of while I was shooting, but rather that I gradually became aware that I never had to wait for the camera when I was shooting in JPEG mode.

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