Sony Mavica CD1000Sony packs a 156 megabyte CD-R into a 2 megapixel Mavica. (Wow!)<<Exposure & Flash :(Previous) | (Next): Operation & User Interface>> Page 7:Shutter Lag & Cycle Time TestsReview First Posted: 7/17/2000 |
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, we now routinely measure it with an electronic
test setup. Likewise, we measure and report on how quickly the camera can take
sequential exposures in various capture modes.
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| Power On -> First shot |
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(Sorry, neglected to measure this one in the short time we had the camera. FD95 was 7.9 seconds.)
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| Shutdown |
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No lens retraction to wait for, meaning zero shutdown normally. Max time is time until CD-R finishes writing a TIFF-mode image.
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| Play to Record, first shot |
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Time is delay until first shot captured. Shorter time is with manual focus, longer is for autofocus.
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| Record to play (max/min res) |
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Shortest time is for image already processed to floppy. Longer is for high res JPEG image just captured. Longest is for text-mode image just captured.
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| Shutter lag, full autofocus |
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Typical to slightly slower than average.
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| Shutter lag, manual focus |
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About average. |
| Shutter lag, prefocus |
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Fairly typical for cameras we've tested. (Prefocus means half-pressed shutter before shot.)
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Like the FD95 it was based on, the CD1000 is fairly typical of digicams we've tested, slightly slower than average in its shutter lag timing in full autofocus mode (0.9 vs roughly 0.8 on average), and about average when prefocused or manually focused. As noted in the "Exposure" section earlier, the CD1000 does have an annoying characteristic in that the viewfinder display freezes momentarily whenever the shutter button is half-pressed. We did find though, that holding the shutter half-pressed (possibly in conjunction with manual focus operation) provided a potential workaround.
From shot to shot, the CD1000 is a bit slower than the fastest digicams, but faster than the floppy-based FD95, and quite surprisingly fast, considering that the CD-R has to spin up and stabilize for every shot recorded. The net result is shot-to-shot cycle times of only 5 seconds in maximum resolution mode, and 4 seconds at minimum resolution. Maximum-resolution TIFF files take quite a bit longer though, nearly 40 seconds to write.
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(secs) |
(frames/sec) |
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| Maximum resolution |
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Shorter time is that for maximum-resolution JPEG, longer time is for maximum-resolution TIFF | |
| Minimum Resolution |
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| Movie Mode |
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Frame rate for MPEG movies is 15 fps.
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