Sony DSC-F505VSony updates their popular DSC-F505V with a 3 megapixel sensor (2.6 million effective pixels) and all-new electronics!<<Exposure & Flash :(Previous) | (Next): Operation & User Interface>> Page 7:Shutter Lag & Cycle Time TestsReview First Posted: 06/01/2000 |
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 allows 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 special
electronic test setup.
As we mentioned earlier, the F505V apparently
features increased image-processing power, in that the camera electronics use a
special Sony single-chip CPU design which eliminates the need for separate
"scratchpad" or "buffer" memory. The result should be faster cycle times and
lower power consumption. In our actual tests however, we found the F505V to be
somewhat slower than the earlier model from shot to shot.
Switching from
Play to Record mode took about 3.68 seconds. Going from Record to Play in the
VGA resolution took about 1.2 seconds while doing the same in the maximum
resolution setting took about 5.3 seconds. The camera took about 7.2 seconds to
get ready for the first picture after being switched on and effectively 0.0
seconds to switch off (because there's no need to wait for the lens to retract
or anything else).
Shutter lag with full autofocus operation on the F505V
is quite variable, depending on the camera-subject distance: At greater shooting
distances, the lag time is about 1.6 seconds. In macro shooting situations
though, the shutter lag stretches to 2.3 seconds. When manual focus is used, the
lag time drops to about 1.3 seconds, while prefocusing by half-pressing the
shutter button before actually shooting the picture reduces lag time to about
0.4 seconds. (The slightly shorter time using prefocus is likely because the
prefocus operation takes care of the automatic white balance function as well.)
All of the F505V's shutter lag timings are somewhat slow relative to the rest of
the 3MP field: This is an area we'd like to see improved in future versions of
this product. Here's a table summarizing our results:
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| Power On -> First shot |
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| Shutdown |
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No time required for lens
retraction... |
| Play to Record, first shot |
|
Time is delay until first shot
captured. |
| Record to play (max/min res) |
|
Slower for max res images |
| Shutter lag, full autofocus |
|
|
| Shutter lag, macro-mode autofocus |
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| Shutter lag, manual focus |
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| Shutter lag, prefocus |
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As noted above, cycle times on the F505V were actually somewhat
slower than those on the original F505. We were a bit puzzled by this, since the
505V supposedly has a faster CPU inside it. It's of course having to deal with
more data than did the 505's CPU, but we still expected to see some improvement.
(One possibility is that the expanded 12-bit digitization accuracy and the
increased processing associated with the more sophisticated tonal compression
that this permits results in a significantly higher processor load.) In any
event, cycle time at maximum resolution and quality was about 5.0 seconds in the
best case and about 6.0 seconds on average. In minimum resolution, cycle times
stayed around 5.0 seconds. Getting the minimum cycle time out of the camera was
a bit frustrating though, because if you hit the shutter button and hold it down
before the camera is ready to shoot again, the F505V completely ignores your
actions. It won't take a picture in this situation unless you let up on the
shutter button and then press it again, making it a bit of a gamble to figure
out when to press the shutter button to get the fastest response. We'd
really like to see a design that notes whether the shutter button is
pressed as soon as it's done processing each shot, and immediately grabs the
next image if it is. - This business of insisting that you must first let up on
the shutter button is really nonsensical. (Not to unfairly single-out Sony for
this, as we've seen the behavior on other cameras as well: It's only that we've
just now decided to mount a campaign against this particular camera behavior,
and Sony is the first manufacturer to be blessed with our attention in this
area. ;-) Again, here is a table summarizing our cycle time
measurements.
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(secs) |
(frames/sec) |
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| TIFF Autofocus |
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(Sorry, we neglected to measure cycle time for TIFF images!) |
| High resolution, autofocus |
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Cycle time was variable, from 5-6
seconds. |
| High resolution, manual focus |
|
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Again variable, only slightly
faster. |
| Minimum resolution, autofocus |
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Consistent cycle time at low
res. |
| Movie Mode |
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