Fuji FinePix S602 Zoom

Shutter Lag/Cycle Times
When you press the shutter release on a camera, there's usually a delay or lag time before the shutter actually fires. This is the time required by the autofocus and autoexposure mechanisms 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 routinely measure it with a custom test setup I built for the purpose. The table below shows the numbers I collected for the FinePix S602.

Boy, I thought I'd never get done testing all the permutations and combinations for this camera's timing! The reason it was so complicated was that it accepts a wide range of cards (SmartMedia, CompactFlash, and Microdrives), and its performance seems to depend fairly heavily on the particular card being used. - This is one camera that can really take advantage of faster memory cards! (And I was surprised to find that SmartMedia cards outperformed even fast CF cards in most situations.)

The basic shutter lag and cycle time performance of the S602 Zoom is really excellent. The 6900 had a fairly fast autofocus system, and it looks like the addition of the passive IR "coarse" focusing on the 602 has made it faster still. - The S602 Zoom has one of the best shutter lag performances I've yet found in a camera costing less than about $2,000, and beats most on cycle time as well. (The Olympus E-10 and E-20 beat it on shutter lag, but not by a lot, and the S602 Zoom beats them both with a big stick when it comes to cycle times.) Cycle time is quite fast when writing to the buffer memory, but is also very speedy after the buffer fills, provided you give the camera a fast enough memory card to work with.

Overall, this looks like about the best sub-$1,500 camera I've seen yet for sports and other fast-paced shooting. Its long 6x zoom is great for getting close to the action, and its fast shutter response, cycle time, and super-handy "Final 5 Frame" modes make for the best prosumer sports shooter I've come across.

Memory Cards & Performance
This really calls for a separate section all its own, as the results were so varied, and therefore interesting. As I mentioned above, the S602 Zoom is definitely a camera that can take advantage of fast memory cards. As it happens though, different cards come up the winners for different operating modes, so your ultimate choice may not be clear-cut. Here's a brief table summarizing some of the data I collected on performance in various operating modes with different memory cards.

As you can see, there's quite a bit of variation between cards. I was surprised to see that the much-maligned SmartMedia card turned in the best performance in some circumstances. Do note though, that it's possible that newer Microdrives would produce better performance, as the read and write rates on the current generation are quite a bit higher than those on the early 340 MB unit I have here to test with. More so than most cameras, there's a huge difference in the performance of the S602 when using a "high speed" card (in this case a Lexar 12x 256 MB card) and a garden-variety unit (here, a "Mr. Flash" generic card, available at amazingly low prices from www.newegg.com). If you're planning lots of shooting (not to mention lots of motion capture) with the S602, an IBM Microdrive could make a lot of sense. Apart from that, plan on either a premium-grade CF card, or a handful of 128 MB SmartMedia cards. (Note that brand really doesn't matter much with SmartMedia cards - As far as I know, they're all the same speed since there's no controller in them.)

The FinePix S602's high-speed, high-resolution motion capture is another area critically dependent on memory card performance. It should come as no surprise that streaming 640x480 images at 30 frames/second places high demands on a memory card's throughput capability. In my testing, I found that some cards simply couldn't record reliably at all, others would record only shorter sequences, while others would blithely accept the video data stream until they physically ran out of space. Here's a quick look at how the cards discussed above performed: