[Leica] Shutter lag, the EOS RT, and the M6

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

Martin H.: >>>I'm guessing the fact that it lost 1/3 (or is it 2/3)
aperture steps
through the use of it's fixed mirror had something to do with it.  For
most people,
the difference between 100ms and 1/3 stop falls in favor of the 1/3
stop.<<<


Martin,
Right, although I felt that that was too often a case of shopping on
paper--in a year of using the RT, I never felt the light loss was an
inconvenience to me.

Shopping on paper--I mean from hands-off analysis of the spec sheet and
the feature list--is the bane of good camera design; it makes the M6
seem like absolute crap, for instance. It's not a good way to look at
things. A similar example is saying that one camera that has a 1/8000
top speed is worse than one with a 1/12,500 top speed. Harumph. In
practice, is this ever going to actively be a frustration? I doubt it.

And it was _ten_ milliseconds shutter lag, Martin, not 100--some top
SLRs are around 60 ms. But that was only in "RT mode," not all the time.
The M6--champion to my knowledge up until the release of the RT--has a
shutter delay of a mere 18 ms., which has always been one of its great
felicities in practice. It's as fast as you are.

Would you believe that some point-and-shoots have been designed,
marketed, and sold with a shutter lag time of as long as *two seconds*?
Boggles the mind. That absolutely inane "feature," red-eye reduction,
often means a practical shutter lag time of even longer. Ridiculous way
to take photographs!

- --Mike