[Leica] That damned shutter lag again.

[lrzeitlin at aol.com (lrzeitlin at aol.com)]

After a frustrating afternoon trying to catch a picture of my grand 
daughter diving into a pool I decided to check the shutter lag of my 
digital cameras. Back in the days when I actually took sports photos 
for a sparse living I had honed my reflexes to the point where I could 
catch pictures of the action as it occurred. My old film Leicas had a 
shutter lag of about .1 second as measured by an electronic timer. 
That's about the same as human reflex time.

Using the same timer I measured the lag on a Canon DSLR and an Olympus 
DSLR. Both had a lag in the range of .3 to .4 seconds when 
autofocusing, .2 to .3 seconds when prefocused. The camera I used to 
photograph my grand daughter was an Olympus EPL1, a mirrorless micro 
4/3 camera with a kit 14 to 42 mm lens. When set to the automatic mode 
in which the camera sets exposure, focuses and stops down the lens, the 
average shutter lag was .76 seconds. In program mode it was slightly 
faster, .63 seconds. No wonder I only caught the splash of water when 
she was fully submerged.

I own the lens bodycap that Olympus released this year. It is basically 
a plastic body cap with a miniscule f8.0 lens (14 mm focal length) in 
the middle like a tiny bug's eye. Fixed focus, no aperature adjustment. 
Still it takes adequately sharp pictures. With this lens mounted on the 
camera the shutter lag averaged only .14 second. Almost as good as a 
film Leica and much better than a digital Leica. With no focusing or 
aperature adjustment possible I suspect that I am close to the minimal 
electrical response time of the camera itself. The next step is to 
mount one of my film Leica lenses on the camera and check that.

Incidentally the shortest lag I ever measured was on a Rollei 35 
mechanical shutter camera. It was only .05 seconds.

Larry Z