Is "shutter lag" the bane of digital photography?

So says a page one WSJ article. This made the front page of the Journal?

Shutter lag is the delay between the time you push the shutter button on a camera and when the picture is actually taken. The WSJ article is correct that, in their default mode, digital cameras don't take photos instantly, and the delay is typically a second because the camera takes time to focus.

If this is really important to you, then you can buy a digital SLR camera (or DSLR for short) which has a separate focusing system and doesn't rely on using the image sensor--it focuses faster but still there is a delay. Compared to a compact digital camera, a DSLR is more expensive and much bigger and heavier. Only dedicated photographers really want to carry one around.

I disagree with the article's take that this problem is somehow unique to digital photography. The article says that "in the age of film, when the button was pressed, the picture was captured in an instant," and that is simply not true. Old auto-focus "point and shoot" film cameras weren't especially speedy at focusing either.

There are two ways to eliminate shutter lag. One way is to depress the shutter button halfway, which causes the camera to focus and stay locked as long as you keep the button half depressed.

The second way is to put the camera into manual-focus mode. Without the need to focus, the camera takes the photo nearly instantly. Because compact digital cameras have a much wider depth of field compared to film cameras (on account of the imaging sensor being much smaller than the area used on 35mm film), you can manually set the focus and nearly all of the frame will be in focus anyway.

The author of the WSJ article really should have learned how to use his camera properly.

Comments

[Eric H]

I think you're mixing too many separate issues, here. No, the old film shutter wasn't instantaneous, but most of what lag there was was due to the autofocus mechanism, not the shutter; turn off auto-focus, and the response time was undetectable (I'd guess under 10 ms). My wife's digital camera has no option for switching to manual focus, so that's no solution. Even when it is in focus, though, the response time is noticeable - I'd guess 100 ms or more.

My former boss, with over 45 years experience in photography, hated taking action shots with his digital precisely because of shutter lag. Was it the focus? Perhaps. But after it did focus, the shutter lag was noticeable and then it took many seconds to dump the images to memory to prepare for the next shot. Could this also be called shutter lag? I don't think so, not in a narrowly technical sense, but to the average consumer, it's much the same thing. I think the WSJ author has identified a legitimate problem that digital camera manufacturers need to address.

Yes, newer more expensive digital cameras allow you access to shut off the focus mechanism, and they also allow you to take many shots per second. But those are the far more expensive cameras, as you point out. The cheap digitals that dominate the consumer market are still much slower to respond to the trigger than a much less expensive film camera was (well, much less expensive for the camera: the total cost of ownership is clearly higher). The manufacturers need to address this issue before I consider replacing my 35 mm camera (I'm a tweener - not a pro, but not a piker, either).

BTW, how does the size of the sensor have anything to do with depth of field? From what I remember of my optics, that's almost purely a function of f/# and sensor resolution, not sensor size.

[L]

and then it took many seconds to dump the images to memory to prepare for the next shot.

I wouldn't call that shutter lag, because it's after the picture is taken. It has one drawback of shutter lag, that you can't take many pictures in succession, but it doesn't mess up the picture, which I think is a bigger problem.