How come a $400 compact digital camera can’t take pictures as fast as my old $40 35mm point-and-shoot camera, but a $4,000 digital camera can? Let’s fix this.
Here’s a scene that plays itself out every day, all across the world:
“OK everyone, hold still. When I count to three, say Cheese!
“Ready?
“One…
“Two…
“Three…
“CHEESE!”
(Pause.)
(Pause some more)
CLICK!
During the first pause, which is measured as approximately 0.3 seconds, everyone is smiling but starting to wonder why nothing is happening. Baby Herman, who was still for a nanosecond after everyone shouted “Cheese,” quickly recovered and proceeded to begin squirming out of his mother’s loving arms.
By the second pause, the twins, Jimmie and Julie, started shoving each other. Cousin Chris couldn’t stifle his yawn any more. Aunt Sadie blinked, and said “I think I blinked.” Grandpa, who has seen better days, was starting to feel his muscles lock up. The dog scampered off.
And when the camera finally decided that it had finished focusing and choosing the right scene mode, it captured the moment, not quite a second after it should have, of a family looking bored, awkward, squirming, asleep, showing early signs of rigor mortis, or gone.
How are you gonna catch the decisive moment with a camera like that?
I have this older camera, a Canon Cannonet (that's a page from its manual at right). I paid $40 for it. It takes 35mm film. I press the shutter, and it takes the picture instantly. No shutter lag. Yes, there is a different kind of lag time with this camera—the time it takes to schlep the film to Target (all the other local labs have closed) and get it processed. The camera doesn’t have autofocus or sophisticated metering modes, and the lens is a flare monster . But still, it makes you wonder: If my $40 film camera can shoot with no shutter lag time, why can’t a $400 digital camera? Or a $150 one?
There are digital cameras that have practically zero lag time, but they are bigger and more expensive. My Canon 40D, for example, has almost no lag. The Leica M8, likewise, shoots like a film camera, with no shutter lag. But both of these cameras cost a small fortune for responsiveness that I can get from a $40 film camera.
So, I have a challenge for camera manufacturers: Make a digital camera with ZERO shutter lag time that anyone can afford.
This is doable
Why do I feel I can lay down this challenge? Because, as I reported last week, it looks like manufacturers have almost resolved the resolution conundrum, developing on-board processing power and firmware that reduces or eliminates digital noise in low light while shooting at higher ISO settings. To do this, some camera makers are pulling back on unnecessary pixel density. They’re starting to realize that an 8MP image will actually look better than a 12MP image.
Smaller images means computing resources can be redirected to other areas, such as reducing or eliminating lag time. The trend is there: Panasonic, for instance, recently unveiled a camera with a 0.3 sec shutter lag, an improvement over the previous model’s 0.6 sec shutter lag. Several other companies, recognizing that shutter lag is one of the biggest complaints consumers have about digital compact cameras, have likewise trimmed lag time.
And so, as the camera industry prepares to cross low light/high ISO image quality problems off its to-do list, let’s focus on eliminating focus lag, so we can all capture decisive moments digitally.
