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Old June 3rd 07, 03:58 PM posted to rec.photo.digital.point+shoot,rec.photo.digital
Robert Coe
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Posts: 4,901
Default Small P&S Shutter Lag Times ?

On Mon, 28 May 2007 12:50:03 +0100, 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.

Before I bought my XTi, my main camera was a Canon G-5. It's reasonably small
and light, has decent optics and more features than I'll ever need, and is
very convenient to use. But it cannot be used to photograph young children;
and to this grandfather, that's a fatal flaw.

My daughter (mother of three of my grandchildren) recently upgraded to one of
the newer Canon P&Ses (S70?), and she says its response time is much improved
over its predecessors. You might want to look into that. (I'm not sure it has
an optical viewfinder, but there may be others in the series that do.)

Bob