Good to average speed for a consumer camera.

The Fujifilm S9100's performance ranges from moderately fast to just average, depending on what you're trying to do. It starts up fairly quickly, and has a reasonably quick shutter response when the lens is set to either wide-angle, or telephoto. If you "pre-focus" the S9100 by half-pressing and holding down the shutter button before the final exposure, it's blazingly fast, with a shutter lag of only 0.010 second, among the fastest on the market. With full autofocus, it's also above average for Prosumer digicams, coming in at 0.62 when set to wide angle, and 0.64 second when set to telephoto. The telephoto numbers were a little tougher to get, getting quite a bit slower at 300mm due to camera shake even on a sturdy tripod.

Shot-to-shot cycle times are a little better than average at about 1.21 seconds for large/fine JPEGs. It can capture as many as seven shots on a CF card this quickly before it has to slow down (only five with our fastest xD card), and wait for the memory card to catch up.

Continuous-mode speed is somewhat slow for this class of camera, at a bit over one frame/second, for up to five shots in succession, but its "Top 4" pre-capture mode is faster, at 1.6 fps. The flash takes about eight seconds to recharge after a full-power shot, longer than average for this class of camera. Connected to a computer, download speeds are exceptionally fast.

Bottom line, the S9100 is responsive enough to handle most normal photo opportunities without significant shutter lag, though sports photographers may want a more responsive camera in terms of continuous shooting.

Battery
Good battery life with either the LCD, or EVF viewfinders.

The Fujifilm S9100 uses four AA-type batteries for power. The table above shows maximum run times based on the Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA) standard procedure for measuring digicam power consumption, and using 2500 mAh NiMH batteries writing to an xD Picture card. These are excellent battery-life numbers, but our standard recommendation of buying a couple of sets of high-capacity NiMH cells, and a good-quality charger still stand.

(Interested readers can find an English translation of the CIPA DC-002 standards document here. (180K PDF document))

Storage
No memory card is included with the Fujifilm FinePix S9100, which accepts either xD Picture Cards, or CompactFlash cards.

The Fujifilm S9100 stores its photos on either xD-Picture Cards, or CompactFlash memory cards, but no card is included with the camera. We strongly recommend buying a large capacity xD-Picture card or a CompactFlash card of at least a 1 - 2GB, to give yourself extra space for extended outings and videos. (Check the shopping link above, cards are really cheap these days, so no reason to skimp.)