Sony DSC-S85Sony extends its S-series Cybershot line with the S85, sporting a 4-megapixel CCD, Exposure Bracketing, and Burst 3 sequential capture.<<Exposure & Flash :(Previous) | (Next): Operation & User Interface>> Page 7:Shutter Lag & Cycle Time TestsReview First Posted: 6/7/2001 |
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, we now routinely measure it using a proprietary Imaging Resource test apparatus.
NOTE! The times shown below are based on measurements performed on a prototype unit. We expect that final production models will be faster, both in shutter lag and cycle time specs, based on comments by Sony staff. We decided to present the figures below anyway though, since the numbers for startup/shutdown times will be valid, and since the other numbers at least set an upper bound on cycle time performance.
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| Power On -> First shot |
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About average for telescoping-lens designs.
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| Shutdown |
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Also about average
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| Play to Record, first shot |
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Time until first shot is captured, from "instant review" mode. Quite fast.
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| Record to play (max/min res) |
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Images appear quickly as a low res version, then "fill-in" within a few seconds. Faster than average to first view, a bit slower than average to full res version. Longest time shown is for high res JPEG, immediate switch to playback mode after shutter is pressed.
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| Shutter lag, full autofocus |
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Somewhat slower than average. (0.9) |
| Shutter lag, manual focus |
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Slower than average. (0.5) |
| Shutter lag, prefocus |
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Faster than average. (0.3)
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| Cycle Time, max/min resolution |
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About average, not bad for 4.1 megapixels. (No buffer, as far as we can tell, all shots at the same speed.) |
| Cycle time, continuous mode |
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Moderately fast, burst of three frames. (Max/min res are the same.) |
Oddly, the S85 showed longer shutter lag times than the S75, possibly a consequence of the prototype status of the camera we tested for this early review. Its performance is thus somewhat below that of other high end cameras it competes with. (We consider 0.8 second lag time to be the average among top-end prosumer cameras.) Lag time in manual focus also slower than average, but prefocus lag is somewhat better than average (0.19 seconds, vs 0.3 for the average in its class). Cycle time from shot-to-shot is pretty good at 4.1 seconds. The camera doesn't appear to use an internal memory buffer to speed capture for the first few shots. The downside is that cycle time is only a little faster than average, but from a more positive perspective, that cycle time is never slower than 4.1 seconds. Continuous mode provides a shot-to-shot interval of only 0.71 seconds, for the first three images captured. (There's obviously a buffer memory here, so we can't understand why it isn't used in normal single-frame shooting.)
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