Nikon D70S

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 D70S is quite fast and responsive. Most impressive of course, is its continuous-mode speed and very long burst lengths (with sufficiently 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 D70S and its predecessor the D70 though, we finally have cameras that can really take advantage of fast cards. With a card offering a write speed rating of 9MB/second 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 either an 80x Lexar card or an Ultra II SanDisk card, I found that I could manage 15 large/fine JPEGs before the speed dropped below the 3 fps maximum rate (3.05 fps by actual measurement), and even then, the decrease in performance was very modest, with the frame rate dropping only to about 2.0 fps. (A little lower than that with the SanDisk Ultra II, with more shot to shot variation.)

To make the most of the D70S though, you really do want to have as fast a memory card as you can afford. When I put an ancient (1x speed?) 64 MB memory card in the D70S, its buffer depth in continuous mode dropped to 9 frames, and the post-buffer-fill cycle time stretched to 3.2 seconds per shot.(!) Take my advice, and make the small incremental investment to purchase a good, fast card to use with your D70S, rather than pinching a few pennies to get a bargain-basement one. 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 D70S does really well. While we reported its startup delay above as being 0.4 second, it's actually pretty hard to come up with a consistent measurement for it, it's that fast. (Really, faster than our reflexes on the timer button.) Bottom line, the D70S can get ready to shoot a picture at least as fast as you can. (Editor Mike Tomkins may have figured out how the D70S manages to start up so quickly: It never entirely powers down! Here's what he found, in his own words:

It seems to me that the reason for this is that even when switched "off", the D70S is partly powered on. To confirm it for yourself, set the camera to manual everything, switch it off, remove the battery - then switch it on, and reinsert the battery while holding the shutter button down. You needn't shut the battery door, just pushing the battery all the way in is enough. If you do this, it takes - subjective guess - around 1 to 1.5 seconds to start up and capture a photo. Which is not to knock it at all, because it works - startup feels incredibly fast, and they've apparently managed to keep power consumption in this partly alive state VERY low since it will happily stay like this for days with no noticeable drain.

Shutter response was a little faster than the original D70, although not dramatically so. Manual-focus and pre-focus lag times were 0.134 and 0.106 seconds, respectively. Here's a brief table, comparing the performance of the D70S with that of the original D70, the Digital Rebel, the Digital Rebel XT, and Canon's EOS-20D:

Overall, the four lower-end cameras come in fairly close to each other with only the more expensive Canon EOS 20D performing notably faster. While the original D70 was dramatically ahead of the competing Canon Digital Rebel across the board, Canon has significantly narrowed the gap in their new Digital Rebel XT. Overall, the impact of the D70S's buffer capacity was subtle but dramatic. (If that's not an oxymoron.) It wasn't so much something that I was that much aware of while I was shooting, but rather that I gradually became aware that I never had to wait for the camera when was shooting in JPEG mode.