Jet lag: Small and speedy snapshot cameras

Joshua Goldman
Senior editor June 22, 2010

Everyone's looking for a point-and-shoot camera fast enough to catch Sally making the winning goal or Fido catching a Frisbee in midair. Sadly, these are few and far between.

There are two main factors that affect your camera's speed: the time it takes to lock focus, which affects how fast the camera captures an image after you press the shutter button; and processing and write speeds, which affect how fast you can shoot the next image after you've just taken a picture. In our reviews, we refer to the first factor as shutter lag and measure it in both high-contrast and low-contrast situations. We call the second factor shot-to-shot time. Here are some of the fastest we've seen, with shot-to-shot times (in good light) of 1.6 seconds or less and shutter lags of 0.5 second or shorter in high-contrast conditions and 1.2 seconds or less in dim conditions.

What's really interesting--and frustrating--is that with the barrage of snapshot cameras that ship every year and how vocal consumers are about how slow point-and-shoot models are, very few models are available that meet these pretty basic performance criteria.