Shutter Lag in D-SLRs

As you know, I’ve been doing a bunch of detailed research on D-SLRs for the past couple of weeks. One thing I’ve started to run across is a spec for shutter lag — the time between pressing the shutter button, and the time the shutter actually fires. With point-and-shoot digitals, this time is often excrutiatingly long.

D-SLRs usually fair much better. The Nikon D70s is marginal — 0.155 seconds in full manual mode, and the Canon 30D is quoted at 65ms (0.065 seconds). The D200 is 0.057 seconds, which is also pretty quick. Incidentally, 155ms is enough time for a small bird to get his or her head turned around 180 degrees!

So, how does this compare to a film SLR? I’d never seen this kind of spec written out, but, modern film SLRs have electronic shutters just like D-SLRs do. I’m certain that there’s some lag time.

In fact, the Nikon F6 has a shutter lag of 37ms (0.037 seconds), and the Canon Elan 7 is said to be just under 100ms, but, there’s no indication of whether or not that included time to focus lock. In fact, very few of the “specs” that do state shutter lag say whether or not autofocus was enabled. Bear in mind, too, that there is on average, about 750ms between the time you decide to take the picture and the time your finger actually pushes the button down! All very interesting food for thought — or not.