Nikon Coolpix 8800

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 custom test system I constructed for the purpose. (With crystal-controlled timing, accurate to 0.01% and with a timing resolution of 1 millisecond.) Here's the full set of timing numbers I measured for the Coolpix 8800:

The Nikon 8800 is a bit of a mixed bag in the speed department. On the one hand, its shutter response is very good, faster than most digicams on the market, at both wide angle and telephoto focal lengths. On the other hand though, the shutter response slows dramatically when the camera is writing to the memory card. Shot to shot cycle time is respectable (if not exactly blazing), and continuous-mode speed is quite good, at roughly 2.3 frames/second in Continuous High mode. When it comes time to write the image data to the memory card though, things slow considerably, with very long buffer-clearing times.

Prior to writing this update, there'd been speculation around the Internet that the camera actually performed faster with slower memory cards, the theory being that these cards better matched the camera's internal operating speed. I'm not sure where this rumor got started, but it clearly wasn't the case with our production sample. We tested it with a wide range of memory cards, and found that, while cards faster than 4x produced only very slight improvements in buffer-clearing times, the faster cards were in all cases faster than slower ones. (The camera does take some advantage of modern, reasonably fast memory cards though. While we found only minor differences in write speeds between 4x and 80x cards (or SanDisk's Ultra and Extreme cards), old non-speed-rated cards were very slow. Bottom line, our advice would be to make sure you purchase name-brand cards known to be at least reasonably fast, but the Coolpix 8800's performance doesn't seem to justify the investment in the highest-speed cards currently available.)

Testing this camera alongside the Coolpix 8400 (which we received at the same time), we found the shutter lag to be markedly different between the two models. No doubt thanks to its hybrid IR/CCD autofocus system, the 8400 is capable of much faster shutter response, as long as its Autofocus Area Mode option is turned off. The 8800 focuses more slowly overall, but suffers no additional loss when AF Area Mode is engaged.

Overall, the Nikon Coolpix 8800 seems to be roughly in the middle of the pack among 8 megapixel models in terms of both focus speed/shutter lag and cycle times.