Olympus C-3030Olympus extends their high-end compact to 3.3 megapixels, adds sound to its movies!<<Exposure & Flash :(Previous) | (Next): Operation & User Interface>> Page 7:Shutter Lag & Cycle Time TestsReview First Posted: 5/18/2000 |
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.
While the C-3030 Zoom is a very fast camera in other respects (see below), it's shutter lag in full autofocus mode is at the slower end of the range: We measured shutter delay at 1.40 seconds using full autofocus. The manual focus option brought the delay down to 0.48 seconds, and prefocusing by half-pressing the shutter button before the exposure dropped the delay to only 0.15 seconds. The camera does have a continuous autofocus mode, which we expected to decrease the shutter delay considerably, since the lens should more or less always be in focus at the time of the exposure. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case, with shutter delays in continuous autofocus mode being on the order of 1.15 seconds (varying from 0.9 to as high as 1.3 seconds: 1.15 seconds seemed to be typical of most shots.) The C-3030 Zoom's autofocus delay is longer than most cameras we've tested, manual focus delay is about average (among camera that offer a manual focus option), and the prefocus delay is shorter than average. (Do note though, that for sports shooting, the impact of the long autofocus delay may be considerably offset by the availability of a very fast continuous-shooting mode - see below.)
Thanks to an enormous 32 megabyte RAM buffer memory, the C-3030 Zoom is an unusually fast camera from shot to shot. We've heard claims that it can capture a shot every second, but our own evaluations fell a little short of that mark. The fastest single-shot (that is, non-continuous mode) shot to shot time we measured was with manual focus selected. In that mode, the C3030 Zoom could capture an image every 1.75 seconds in its lowest resolution mode, and every 2.2 seconds in high resolution (non-TIFF) mode. It's possible there may be some additional delay if you ever managed to fill up the buffer, but we never encountered this while using the 16 MB SmartMedia card supplied with our test unit. (We filled up the memory card in a about 16.3 seconds, capturing a total of 8 shots at maximum resolution.) In autofocus mode, the lens-focusing delay increased the cycle time by about 0.9 seconds, to 2.65 and 3.1 seconds, for the low and high resolution images respectively.
We mentioned the C-3030's high speed in continuous or "sequence" mode earlier. Sequence mode has two options, normal and autofocus. In normal sequence mode, the camera focuses and calculates exposure and white balance once, as soon as the shutter button is pressed. These settings are then held for the entire series of five rapid-fire shots. In our tests, that series of five shots happened very quickly indeed, clocked at a frame rate of 3.17 frames per second. This is seriously fast for full-resolution images! In autofocus sequence mode, the camera focuses and calculates exposure and white balance for each shot in the series. This doesn't slow it down as much as you might expect though, as the camera apparently only has to make minor adjustments to the focus from one shot to the next. The end result is a frame rate of 1.74 frames per second, a very respectable performance.
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