Beware shutter lag in digital cameras

Consumer Reports News: February 18, 2010 11:42 AM

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Don't become a victim of shutter lag.

Let's say you were lucky enough to be standing on the sidelines of Whistler Mountain's downhill ski course yesterday, waiting for Lindsey Vonn to come tearing around the bend. You had your digital camera at-the-ready to snap an historic photo of the skier en route to her gold medal. As she passed, you pressed the shutter button...and groaned as you saw on the viewer screen that you only caught the tail end of her body in the frame. She was too fast, and your camera was too slow.

Ever happen to you? If so, you've been the victim of shutter lag.

If you can remember them, older film cameras took snapshots instantaneously. Today's digital cameras take a few milliseconds to process and render an image, resulting in a delay that can spoil a heat-of-the-moment shot. The only digital cameras these days that eliminate shutter lag are expensive SLRs, used by camera aficionados and professional photographers.

In our tests of point-and-shoot cameras, we measure the shutter lag—or as we call it, first-shot delay—for each model and include the data in our digital camera Ratings (available to subscribers). The fastest cameras have virually no delay at all, and the slowest have a delay of 1 second or longer.

If you aren't a subscriber and can't check our first-shot-delay ratings, at least try cameras out in the store to see how long it takes the model to actually capture an image after you depress the shutter. Otherwise, that fraction of second that distinguishes an Olympical gold medal from a silver might also relegate a frameable action shot to the digital trash bin.

—Nick K. Mandle