Canon PowerShot S10Canon packs 2 megapixels and a 2x optical zoom into the smallest digicam yet!<<Exposure & Flash :(Previous) | (Next): Operation & User Interface>> Page 7:Shutter Lag & Cycle Time TestsReview First Posted: 12/5/1999 |
Shutter Lag/Cycle Times
When you press the shutter release on a camera, there's usually a delay 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 almost never reported on, and can significantly affect the picture taking experience, we now routinely measure it (using an electronic test setup, with time resolution limited only by the camera's shutter speed.)
On the S10, we measured the shutter lag time with full auto focus at about 1.1 seconds, a little slower than most of the field. Alternatively, shutter lag with prefocus (a half press of the shutter button before the actual exposure itself) is only 0.19 seconds, slightly faster than most.
The camera obviously has some buffer memory, as the first three shots in high-res mode are much faster than the subsequent ones. We found the shot-to-shot cycle time at the maximum resolution and image quality setting to be about 3.7 seconds for first three shots of a rapid fire series. The time then increased to 6.7 seconds for all succeeding ones. It seems like the camera is continuously emptying out the buffer memory as you prepare for the next shot. Consequently, if you wait more than 15 or 20 seconds after the last shot, you'll be able to shoot another three in rapid succession. In the lower resolution settings, the minimum shot-to-shot cycle time is about the same, but you can shoot proportionately more frames before you run out of buffer memory. A helpful feature is a little readout that shows up in the status display, clueing you into how much buffer memory is available.
With an IBM MicroDrive (340 megabyte hard drive-based Type II CompactFlash storage card), cycle time after the buffer is filled decreased to only 4.8 seconds, and the buffer memory emptied much more quickly after the last shot was taken: Only about 10 seconds to completely empty the buffer, as compared to 23 seconds with standard CompactFlash cards.
Shot-to-shot cycle times in the Continuous Shooting mode are 0.63 seconds (1.59 frames per second) in the lowest quality mode and around 4.2 seconds in highest quality setting.
Follow Imaging Resource: