Jack Campin - bogus address wrote:
I have been asked to help buy a compact digital camera, and am
currently, with the intended purchaser, making our shortlist of
models to look at based on published spec.s and reviews. But
as we all know, published spec.s very rarely say anything about
shutter lag...
Only if you're not looking in the right place. DPReview gives
the lags times on all it's full reviews.

But not on its searchable comparison table. Are we supposed to
scan reviews for every camera in creation to find this out?

This is THE most important feature for me - my usual axes are an
ancient Leica rangefinder and a TLR, I even find film SLRs rather
slow. Second is an optical viewfinder (I'm too presbyopic to use
a screen). Third is low-light performance. I don't give a monkey's
about pixel count or zoom and I want the thing to be cheap as it'll
be going to some fairly rough places and might well not be coming
back. Doesn't need to be new. What is there?

I've never owned a digital, but I've borrowed a few reasonably
expensive point & shoots from friends and they all had unusably
slow response times for anything I wanted to do.

For most new P&S cameras, shutter-lag is not the problem, but rather
very slow focusing. My cameras both separate the focusing from the
shutter-lag by allowing a 'half-press' of the shutter button and an
indicator (green light) to indicate when focusing is done. In low
light, P&S cameras can take a LONG time to achieve focus (if they will
at all), but the actual lag after that is quite short. If there is
enough light for focusing, then I have never had a problem with
shutter-lag on either of my current Kodak P&S cameras. Even a film
camera has some shutter lag since the shutter blades must open and close.