Is this still an issue? I can't recall using a camera made in the last 6 years that didn't take the picture near-instantly so long as you did the normal half-press prefocus, or used manual focus.
"Is this still an issue? I can't recall using a camera made in the last 6 years that didn't take the picture near-instantly so long as you did the normal half-press prefocus, or used manual focus."
This is absolutely still an issue. Go to your local camera store and play around with even a low-end 'fast' camera such as the Canon 7D and you'll see in no uncertain terms just how fast good SLRs are. Even Micro 4/3 cameras are catching up now.
Shutter latency is the single thing keeping point and shoot cameras, or smartphone cameras, from truly dominating.
I use SLR's pretty commonly, and I'm not sure how a 4/3's camera would be different given that as far as I'm aware they use a contrast-detection system that uses separate AF sensors, and not the imaging sensor. That's probably different for EVIL cameras, though.
Maybe we mean different things, though. There is a time between the half-press of the shutter and obtaining focus, and that can be half a second to several seconds depending on conditions. I don't consider that shutter lag, though - is this what you're referring to? I mean the time it takes to go from that half-press to a full press and capture the image.
On a 5 year old cheap Panasonic pocket camera I find that this time, half-press to full-press, is nearly imperceptible. Maybe I'm just fortunate, or not as discerning, though.
I disagree with lordbusiness - disregarding focusing time (as previous poster said, "half-press" the shutter first), EVIL/mirrorless cameras are going to be faster than SLRs unless incompetently engineered.
There are outliers like the NEX-5 which had a shutter lag of over 100ms, even when pre-focused, but the modern mirrorless equivalents of the 7D achieve less shutter lag.
A DSLR has the intrinsic problem of having to wait for the mirror to move out of the way before the image can be captured. The mirror mechanism's speed is limited by the strength and flexibility of its materials (too fast and it'll break), and the power level of the actuator moving it. Not to mention the faster you move the mirror the more slap you will get, causing vibrations in the camera that affect image quality. There is a "limit of physics and material science" problem inherent in SLRs.
A mirrorless camera has none of these disadvantages - and it shows, even the vaunted Canon 1D has a shutter lag between 40-50ms depending on model, while the Sony NEX-5N has a shutter lag of 22ms.
The Canon 7D lordbusiness brings up clocks in at ~70ms. In fact none of Canon's DSLRs can get below 40ms.
The Olympus E-M1 comes in at 50ms, as is the Fuji X-T1. Mirrorlesses already outperform even high-end DSLRs when it comes to shutter lag. And they will continue to get faster as more mirrorlesses move to electronic instead of mechanical shutters.
Shutter latency is the single thing keeping point and shoot cameras, or smartphone cameras, from truly dominating.
That depends on the use case. A couple years ago I took a train ride across the country, taking photos from the observation car with a P&S camera. The shutter latency was absolutely infuriating.
On the other hand, when I'm doing a landscape on a tripod with remote shutter release, I wouldn't even notice if it took an extra second or two.
IMHO, the biggest thing is control, of which shutter latency is just one facet. All the other stuff about aperture, ISO sensitivity, pre-focus, etc. come into play in various use cases.
The point is they also dominate in a metric where they shouldn't: the number of 'missed moments'. I can't count how many pictures I simply discard because they were taken 1/4 second after the point in time where they should have been. I keep trying but it's a constant source of frustration.
Absolutely. Nothing beats an old fashioned film based camera with the shutter pre-wound (yes, that's hell on the shutter life but it makes for it up with all those moments you caught instead of missed).
Just switching the camera 'on' takes too much time.
I don't really believe that shutter-lag is such an issue that it gives film camera's a defining edge.
My M3 lags 16ms, but you need to focus it yourself obviously, my flagship Canon is slower at 40ms, but has autofocus and hammers out images at an insane amount per second.
My fuji viewfinder cam is infuriatingly slow compared to the beast above, but I feel I have only myself to blame for any missed moments.
Yep. Nothing worse than bringing up the camera when you need it most and all you see is a black screen or the phone restarts. I'm talking about you iPhone!!!
Mechanical optical stablization does not help with shutter lag. It helps if the camera is moving during the shot, but it does not compensate for the delay between when you wanted to take the shot and when your smartphone actually took the shot, which can result in the shot being missed, or the shot being blurry because the subject started moving.
