Nikon Coolpix 5000Nikon moves into the 5 megapixel era with a new chip, new lens, and new body, but no retreat from the legendary Nikon feature set!<<Exposure & Flash :(Previous) | (Next): Operation & User Interface>> Page 7:Shutter Lag & Cycle Time TestsReview First Posted: 9/18/2001 |
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 is to allow 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, I now routinely measure it with a special electronic test setup I constructed for the purpose. Here's the full set of timing numbers I measured for the Coolpix 5000:
|
|
||
|
|
Normal Card |
|
| Power On -> First shot |
|
Rather slow: Takes quite a while for the lens to telescope
out and the camera to get ready to shoot.
|
| Shutdown |
|
It takes 3.7 seconds for the lens to retract if the
camera is otherwise unoccupied, but could take a hundred seconds or
more if you've just filled the buffer memory with a large continuous
sequence. - The lens doesn't retract until the camera has finished saving
data to the memory card.
|
| Play to Record, first shot |
|
About average for a high-end prosumer camera.
|
| Record to play |
|
Pretty quick to display images, using the "quick
review" button.
|
| Shutter lag, full autofocus |
|
This is a little on the slow side of average for high-end consumer cameras. Nikon had touted very fast shutter delay before the camera came out, but the full-autofocus numbers really don't qualify. |
| Shutter lag, manual focus |
|
Also somewhat leisurely - the average delay in manual focus mode for high-end consumer models is about 0.5 seconds. (Still too slow, IMHO.) |
| Shutter lag, prefocus |
|
Quicker than average, and not bad, but still not the fastest "prosumer" camera in this regard. (Lest any question, I repeated this timing test multiple times, with identical results. I occasionally got slightly faster times, but the absolute shortest in any mode was 0.137 seconds) |
| Cycle time, large/fine files |
|
Pretty fast. Shorter time is for first 8 shots, then need to wait for the buffer to "drain" before next shot. The buffer doesn't completely empty (ready for another set of 8 shots) until 49.8 seconds has elapsed. |
| Cycle time, small/basic files |
|
Pretty quick. Over 80 shots before buffer filled. |
| Cycle time, TIFF files |
|
TIFF mode files are huge, take a looong time to write. Quite a bit of variation in TIFF writing speed between cards - The time at left was with a SimpleTech 320MB card, a Lexar 12x card wrote in about 24 seconds. |
| Continuous mode (High Speed), large files |
|
2 frames per second for 3 frames, then must wait about 22 seconds before it will snap the next set of 3 frames. (Nikon's spec is 3 fps, I'm not sure why my test showed slower. I repeated several times with two different units, with the same results.) |
| Continuous mode (Low Speed), large files |
|
Snaps up to 8 frames at the roughly 1.3 frame/second rate, then drops to between 9 and 10 seconds per frame. (Nikon's spec is 1.5 fps.) Buffer clears completely in about 67 seconds. |
| Multi-Shot 16 |
|
Divides full-sized frame into a 4x4 matrix of sub-pictures. 0.29 seconds between shots (3.44 frames/second) for 16 low-res images,then 7.16 second delay before next shot is ready. |
| High Speed Sequence |
|
An interesting mode, saves files at "normal" (medium) JPEG quality, but can snap a very large number of shots without pausing. - Nikon claims up to 100 (likely depending on subject detail), in my test, I got 61 shots, at 0.77 seconds between frames (1.3 frames/second). When done though, it takes a *really* long time to flush the buffer, 159 seconds in my test. |
| Ultra High Speed |
|
WOW, this is fast! Great for time/motion studies (golf/tennis swings?). Captures up to 100 images at 320x240 resolution, "normal" JPEG quality. Shot to shot interval is only 0.035 seconds, or 28.8 frames/second. - This is actually faster than the 5000's movie mode, but you can only capture about 3 seconds of action, and the action is in individual files. When done shooting, it took the camera 91.3 seconds to empty the buffer memory to the card. |
| Movie Mode |
|
Movie mode will record up to 60 seconds of 320x240 "QVGA" resolution action with sound. It took 70.4 seconds for the camera to finish writing to the card after a 60 second clip was shot. |
In normal operating modes, the Coolpix 5000 is quick between shots, with a very large buffer permitting capture of 8 full-resolution, maximum-quality frames at roughly 2.2 second intervals. It's various "high speed" modes provide a useful range of options, trading off various parameters against speed in different ways. Its Continuous (High Speed) mode captures bursts of up to three frames, at a rate of 2 frames per second, while the Continuous (Low Speed) mode captures up to 8 frames at 1.3 frames per second. (Note that these figures are based on my own measurements: Nikon claims 3 and 1.5 frames per second respectively for these modes.) Finally, the "High Speed Sequence" mode drops image quality at full resolution to the "normal" setting, but permits you to capture a very large number of shots (Nikon claims up to 100, depending on subject matter, I managed 61 shots of my timing display). Being the "measurement nut" that I am, I found the "Ultra High Speed" mode the most interesting. - It lets you capture up to 100 frames at 320x240 resolution, at an incredible 30 frames per second. - This would be great for things like analyzing golf or tennis swings, or possibly monitoring industrial processes, etc.
While its cycle time is really excellent, I didn't find the 5000's shutter lag to be up to Nikon's advance billing. Prior to its release, Nikon promoted the 5000 as having speed on a par with film cameras. The result was a lot of buzz about how fast the 5000 would be when it came out, fueled in part by my own excited burbling about what that might mean. It turns out though, that the claim was actually quite restricted in its scope, only referring to shutter delay when the camera was prefocused. Even at that, many digicams are as fast or faster than the 5000 when they are prefocused before the shot. My own tests showed a prefocus shutter delay of about 157 milliseconds, with occasional instances slightly below that. The fastest time I saw on any trial was 137 milliseconds. Nikon's internal numbers apparently reflect a shutter delay of well under 100 milliseconds, but I never saw a delay that short on either of the two production units I tested. In full autofocus mode, the 5000 is actually a bit slower than average, with times in my tests ranging from 1.06 to 1.18 seconds (wide angle and telephoto, respectively). These times are far from the best, but likewise aren't horrible either, overall being a bit on the high side of average. (They're almost identical to the shutter delay times I measured for the Sony F707, for instance, which came in at 1.06 to 1.11.) Nikon's promotion of the 5000 as a camera with low shutter lag raised expectations in this area though, to the point that some users are bound to be disappointed. With a shutter delay slightly on the long side of average, the 5000 might have passed with little comment in this area. Given the expectations that were raised though, I'm afraid Nikon could be in for a hard time from some quarters. (Personally, I think all consumer and prosumer digicams are far too slow, and would have liked to see the 5000 come in with a much faster shutter-lag performance. I don't want to blast them though, when other manufacturers products don't perform all that differently.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I'm expecting this area to be controversial, and so prepared the table above based on data extracted from my reviews of a number of high-end "prosumer" cameras currently on the market. As you can see, the 5000's shutter delay performance is pretty close to average overall. Some cameras are faster in full autofocus but slower in manual focus or prefocus modes. (The Olympus 4040, for instance.) No one camera wins decisively overall, and all of them are grossly slow (IMHO) compared to even midrange film cameras. I do wish someone would come up with the definitive answer for slow AF performance on consumer/prosumer digicams, but thus far nobody has. Definitely an area with great room for improvement by all parties, at least in the $1200-and-below price range.
Reader Comments! --> Visit our discussion forum for the Nikon Coolpix 5000!
Follow Imaging Resource: