Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F717

Shutter Lag/Cycle Times
When you press the shutter release on a digital camera, there's usually a lag time before the shutter actually fires. This time allows the autofocus and autoexposure mechanisms to do their work and can amount to a significant delay in some situations. Since this number is rarely reported by manufacturers or reviewers, and can significantly affect the picture-taking experience, Imaging Resource now measures shutter lag and cycle times using a proprietary electronic test setup.

Overall, the DSC-F717 is a very fast camera, beginning with a great startup time thanks to not having to telescope its lens before it can shoot. Autofocus speed is exceptional - This is one of the very fastest "prosumer" cameras I've tested to date, as of late August, 2002! (The Fuji S602 Zoom is slightly faster at wide angle, but a good bit slower at telephoto.) Shutter lag in manual focus mode is the best I've seen on a prosumer camera model, and prefocus lag time is excellent as well. No matter how short, I'd always like to see shutter lag be lower still: Even the 0.63-0.65 seconds of the F717 is still longer than I'd like to see. That said, Sony deserves high praise for raising the bar on the other camera manufacturers in this regard. Big kudos to the engineers!

Cycle times are very good as well, at 1.47 seconds between shots in large/fine mode, and (oddly), 1.8 seconds in small/normal mode. The 717 has a roomy buffer memory too, as it can snap up to 9 shots in large/fine mode before slowing to wait for data to flush to the Memory Stick. - And even when the buffer is full, cycle time is still a very respectable 3.1 seconds for maximum resolution files. In burst three mode, the F717 captures frames at intervals of 0.47 seconds, a rae of 2.37 frames/second. And in Ultra HS mode, the frame rate is nearly 30 fps.

About the only thing the F717 doesn't do very quickly is write full-sized TIFF images to the card. Times I measured here varied a fair bit, but the average was around 60 seconds per file. (!)

Another huge improvement relative to the F707 is that the F717 doesn't "penalize" you for pressing the shutter button too quickly after the previous shot. With the F707 (and a lot of other cameras as well), if you press the shutter button immediately after the previous exposure, the camera won't fire the shutter until you release the shutter and then press it again. In this situation, the F717 exhibits the (greatly) preferred response of simply firing the shutter as soon as it's able to do so.

After the somewhat leisurely AF response of the F707, the speed of the F717 was welcome surprise and a great accomplishment on the part of Sony's engineering team. Combined with its long, sharp 5x zoom lens, the F717's speed makes it about the best "sports" camera I've seen yet for under $1,000.