Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F828

Sony makes a great deal of the F828's speed in their marketing pitch for the camera, and the numbers above show that there's a good reason for this: The F828 is by far the fastest prosumer-grade camera I've tested to date, and is the fastest camera at any price point when it comes to shutter lag in the pre-focused mode. (That is, the shutter lag after you've half-pressed and held down the shutter button, prior to the exposure itself.) Other reviewers have reported this lag time as 0.1 second, but that's probably just the resolution of their test setup. I was so astonished at the 0.009 second prefocus lag that I repeated my tests three times, for a total of about 40 shots, and got the 9 millisecond number very consistently. Of course, normal full-autofocus lag is what really matters to most shooters, and the F828 excels there as well. - At maximum wide angle, it routinely focuses and shoots in only 0.25 seconds. This time stretches to a still-fast 0.69 seconds at full telephoto, but is a very fast 0.42 seconds with the lens set to the 100mm equivalent focal length, still a reasonable telephoto. Shutter lag in manual focus mode is also exceptionally short, at only 0.20 seconds.

Cycle times are also quite impressive, with a minimum cycle time of only 1.26-1.27 seconds in manual focus mode with the auto review display turned off. Add ~0.05 seconds for autofocus at wide angle, or ~ 0.75 seconds for autofocus at maximum telephoto. Most impressive is the fact that the F828 appears able to write its image files to the memory card at this rate, without having to slow down to wait for the card to catch up. - There's no sign of a buffer, or if there is one, it holds more than the 27 shots I snapped at maximum resolution before I got tired of pressing the shutter button. Continuous-mode operation is also impressive, capturing up to 7 frames (regardless of image size or JPEG quality setting) at a rate of 2.65 frames/second. Finally, a "Movie" continuous mode shoots 16 tiny 320x240 images at a selectable frame rate of 7.5, 15, or 30 frames/second, storing them in a single 1280x960 image file.

The camera slows a fair bit when recording full-resolution RAW or TIFF files, although its performance there is still very much in the top echelon, particularly considering that it's saving 8 megapixel images. It really would be nice to see some level of buffering applied to RAW and TIFF files though, as a lot of prospective users of the F828 are likely to want to shoot in RAW mode.

Overall, the F828 is easily the fastest "prosumer" non-SLR camera on the market, by a wide margin. With its long 7x zoom lens, it'll make an excellent camera for sports shooters. (Although it'd be nice to see something like Fuji's "Final 5" shooting mode, for capturing critical moments despite lagging reflexes on the part of the photographer.

The only complaint I have about the F828's timing performance is that it's one of the (unfortunately many) cameras that "penalize" you for pressing the shutter button too quickly after the previous shot is taken. If you click and hold down the shutter button immediately after a shot is taken, the camera will save that shot to the memory card and then just sit there. You have to release the shutter button and press it again to take the next photo. In practice, you can develop a pretty good sense of how long to wait before pressing the shutter button, and so avoid the "penalty," but it's easy to get a little over-eager in the face of fast-breaking action. And the camera should really handle this anyway. Why can't the camera simply notice that the shutter button is still down and fire off another frame as soon as it's able? As noted, this is an unfortunately common behavior among even the higher-end digital cameras I've tested, but one that I'd really like to see done away with.