Will the Rebel XT (or any dSLR) give instant write time?

[mike62]

Will the XT (or any dSLR for that matter) give for all practical purposes instant write times to the card? What I am trying to say is will the dSLR take a picture EVERY time I press the shutter without the delay you have with point and shoots? I have a Fuji S9000 now and it is great but while it has several features above normal point and shoots it is still in that category and will delay between pictures.

Will a dSLR eliminate the delay much like the old SLR cameras?

Thanks.

[coldrain]

Yes, it is near instant. You can make 3 pics a second, so you can imagine how fast the camera is available in between shots.

[David Metsky]

Every camera will have some time spent writing to memory, be it internal or on the card. dSLRs (pretty much all of them) will be faster in this and P&S, but many of the P&S cameras are very good at this as well.

There really are two issues here. One is shutter lag, the time between when you push the shutter release and the picture is taken. That is a result of the camera needing to "think" about what settings it needs. dSLRs will be much better here than P&S, very similar to the feel of a film SLR. The newest P&S are much better as well, but still not up to the speed of a dSLR.

The other is shot-to-shot time. This is mainly due to writing data to the memory cache and eventually to the card. Again, dSLRs will be better here due to bigger dedicated cache and faster write speeds. Look for specs on continuous mode shooting, some P&S are up to 3fps, many dSLRs are 7+. But in that mode the cameras aren't always refocusing on the subject.

-dave-

[mike62]

I am thinking my wife would enjoy the dSLR better. She takes very few pics for the most part mainly holidays, vacation, school events but complains about "missing" the shot. She is not nor will she ever be knowledgeable on such things as "anticipating" the shot with point and shoots and therefore she gets frustrated. I myself am leap years from being efficient and get frustrated sometimes when I want to take quick back to back shots and miss the "moment" as she calls it.

I wish I had waited now for what seems to be the lower prices on some dSLR cameras as it has only been a few months since I got my Fuji S9000 but I would love to have an XT which I saw a good price on. If I were to get the XT I guess the best thing is the (2) 1 gig cards I got for my Fuji are CF and will work in the XT.

[cdifoto]

I am thinking my wife would enjoy the dSLR better. She takes very few pics for the most part mainly holidays, vacation, school events but complains about "missing" the shot. She is not nor will she ever be knowledgeable on such things as "anticipating" the shot with point and shoots and therefore she gets frustrated. I myself am leap years from being efficient and get frustrated sometimes when I want to take quick back to back shots and miss the "moment" as she calls it.

I wish I had waited now for what seems to be the lower prices on some dSLR cameras as it has only been a few months since I got my Fuji S9000 but I would love to have an XT which I saw a good price on. If I were to get the XT I guess the best thing is the (2) 1 gig cards I got for my Fuji are CF and will work in the XT.


Even with a dSLR you need to anticipate the shot if you're doing live grab-action. If you can see it in the viewfinder, you already missed it. It's not the camera's fault but the reaction time of the photographer. Seeing the moment and actually hitting the button still incurs a delay. That's the photographer, NOT the camera.

[cwphoto]

Try photographing with both eyes open. It's a little weird at first but once you've mastered it your percentages of well-timed shots goes way up.

[Norm in Fujino]

Will the XT (or any dSLR for that matter) give for all practical purposes instant write times to the card? What I am trying to say is will the dSLR take a picture EVERY time I press the shutter without the delay you have with point and shoots? I have a Fuji S9000 now and it is great but while it has several features above normal point and shoots it is still in that category and will delay between pictures.

Will a dSLR eliminate the delay much like the old SLR cameras?


what you're really talking about is "buffer depth," namely, how much of a buffer memory the camera has. Most entry-level dSLRs have a buffer that will allow 3-5(?) continuous shots (depends on the recording mode, from the minimum size of highly compressed Jpeg to the maximum of RAW+Jpeg) before the necessity of writing the buffered shots to the physical memory card. I don't know about other makes, but with the Olympus E-300, after the buffer is full (4 RAW frames), you have to wait about a second for the first photo taken to write to the card before you can take a fifth (first-in, first-out). If you shoot paparazzi style (continuous shooting mode), the buffer depth represents a limitation on how fast you can take the fifth and subsequent shots, but since I virtually never use that mode, it's a non-issue for me.

Also, the speed at which the camera is able to empty the buffer to the card is highly dependent on the speed of the memory card used. Which is why I use only Sandisk Extreme III. Note, though, that differeng cameras may not fully support the high speed of the Sandisk Extreme III.