lct Posted June 23, 2015 Share #121 Posted June 23, 2015 Advertisement (gone after registration) It is not a matter of digital age. My 8+ years old 5D1 wakes up almost immediately whilst i've got an average of 2s with the M240 and a dozen SD cards when i tested it last year (http://tinyurl.com/kp8qe83). It is possible to get immediate wakeups with the M240 though. Suffice it to set "Auto Power Off" to "Off" and to save it as an User Profile if need be. Works like a charm for me. I would plan getting another battery if you do that often though. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted June 23, 2015 Posted June 23, 2015 Hi lct, Take a look here M240 FW. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
pico Posted June 23, 2015 Share #122 Posted June 23, 2015 I'm sorry but you're wrong Try with different SD capacity and performance and will see the difference How am I wrong? SD card hosts (the camera) do not poll the whole card for available space. If there is an issue with large cards, then it is due to pessimistic programming by Leica. There is no excuse for that. . Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pico Posted June 23, 2015 Share #123 Posted June 23, 2015 So may I infer 1: that for the M240 readiness, the SD card read time is more important than its write time and also the more files you have on a card the longer it takes the camera to be ready to shoot after wake up? No. Not if the programers follow the protocols. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
LocalHero1953 Posted June 23, 2015 Share #124 Posted June 23, 2015 I’ve never missed it in any of my cameras. Actually I find it irritating if there are some pictures stored not on the card but in some internal memory, so to get at those pictures I either have to hunt for a USB cable or copy the contents of internal memory to a card. As I’ve said, having internal memory is quite unusual for system cameras. Some compact cameras have internal memory but it is generally so small as to be largely useless (a couple of megabytes). And even when there is internal memory, it is rarely faster than a card. Having internal memory doesn’t reduce start-up times. Like I have explained in my previous post, the problem is not the lack of internal flash memory. As a matter of fact, internal vs external flash memory would not make any difference on a firmware standpoint. I for one do not want internal flash memory, as flash memory is prone to failure. I don't doubt that both of you are right. but you write as two technically knowledgeable guys who know why the M performs as it does. I can understand that, but that doesn't mean that I have to accept such lesser performance when better performance has been available in the past and, from lct's post, is available in other cameras now. Edit: I have no doubt that near instant start up or wake up is possible with the right combination of engineering and firmware. I hope that is in the next M. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pico Posted June 23, 2015 Share #125 Posted June 23, 2015 I am sure you're right. But as a customer I ask: WHY is there no internal flash memory? It is too slow, and fatigues more quickly than volatile RAM. A possibly irrelevant aside, on the M9 you can shoot several pictures with no SD card. Leave the camera ON, insert the SD card and it will write to the SD card. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
helohe Posted June 23, 2015 Share #126 Posted June 23, 2015 No internal flash memory should not prevent the camera from taking at least one picture or two while waiting for the sd card to get ready. The leica M has enough internal ram (1 GB I IIRC) to store a picture while waiting for the results of the card. If the card is ready the pictures would get written. Should the card be full or missing a warning message could be displayed. There is absolutely no technical reason why the camera should wait for the sd card before allowing one to take a photo. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mornnb Posted June 23, 2015 Share #127 Posted June 23, 2015 Advertisement (gone after registration) When the camera is turned on it needs to scan the card to check what is on it – it could have changed in the interim. The camera doesn’t look for free blocks though; that is a much more low-level task. Surely the camera could be saving the image to RAM while it checks the SD card? The camera has a buffer, the firmware should take better advantage of it. This is rather inexcusable for a camera which is supposed to be for street photography and quick reaction to events. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pico Posted June 24, 2015 Share #128 Posted June 24, 2015 No internal flash memory should not prevent the camera from taking at least one picture or two while waiting for the sd card to get ready. The leica M has enough internal ram (1 GB I IIRC) to store a picture while waiting for the results of the card. If the card is ready the pictures would get written. Should the card be full or missing a warning message could be displayed. There is absolutely no technical reason why the camera should wait for the sd card before allowing one to take a photo. The camera does have memory. It is not 'flash' type, which is good because flash memory is fragile and would likely lead to premature failures. Instead it has volatile memory. Considering an SD card being full - it rarely happens except with tiny, tiny cards which I'm sure none of us use. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
CheshireCat Posted June 24, 2015 Share #129 Posted June 24, 2015 The leica M has enough internal ram (1 GB I IIRC) to store a picture while waiting for the results of the card. 1 GB is enough to contain about 40 lossless compressed DNG raw images. That's enough to cover continuous shooting for 13 seconds. Double the numbers for the MP model. There is no excuse. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjh Posted June 24, 2015 Share #130 Posted June 24, 2015 Surely the camera could be saving the image to RAM while it checks the SD card? Which camera does this? My Pentax DSLR happily shoots without a card, only to discard those shots. When there is a card in the slot the first shot coincides with the LCD displaying the number of pictures that will fit on the card so I assume that the card gets scanned first. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mornnb Posted June 24, 2015 Share #131 Posted June 24, 2015 My Canon 5D Mark III, turn it on and it can take a shot in less than a second. And it has a CF and SD card to check. However, it does have a processor than is significantly faster than the Maestro so it may simply be scanning very quick. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pico Posted June 24, 2015 Share #132 Posted June 24, 2015 There is absolutely no technical reason why the camera should wait for the sd card before allowing one to take a photo. The camera waits, keeping you from taking pictueres only when the buffer is full. You can take pictures while the camera processes and writes to the card. How else could it possibly work? . Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Exodies Posted June 24, 2015 Share #133 Posted June 24, 2015 Just to feed my fondness for the blindingly obvious - don't forget that the camera OS is a real-time one. Theories about what it can do based on experience with Windows, OS X, or Unix are unlikely to be correct. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjh Posted June 24, 2015 Share #134 Posted June 24, 2015 The camera waits, keeping you from taking pictueres only when the buffer is full. You can take pictures while the camera processes and writes to the card. How else could it possibly work? . These are two different issues. The camera stuffs raw data in the buffer with a second process digesting the raw data and writing JPEG and DNG files to the card; both processes are executed in parallel. The issue discussed here, however, concerns the initialisation sequence on start-up when the camera determines whether there is a card in the slot, what’s on the card etc.. This can easily be sequential even when the image processing pipeline is not. And it usually is; initialisation comes before the camera commences normal operation. The only question is whether initialisation could not be sped up somehow. I suppose it could but since I haven’t seen the source code of the firmware, I cannot offer any more specific comments. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
LocalHero1953 Posted June 24, 2015 Share #135 Posted June 24, 2015 The only question is whether initialisation could not be sped up somehow. I suppose it could but since I haven’t seen the source code of the firmware, I cannot offer any more specific comments. This has been a concern for many since the M240 came out. I guess that simple firmware changes will not give much further improvement, and it will have to await both hardware and firmware improvements. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjh Posted June 24, 2015 Share #136 Posted June 24, 2015 I guess that simple firmware changes will not give much further improvement, and it will have to await both hardware and firmware improvements. I’m not sure about that. For one thing I don’t see how the card could be changed without the camera electronics noticing this as long it is in stand-by mode rather than switched off. (OK, maybe it could happen if you used a third-party bottom plate providing access to the card slot.) The card scanning step could just be omitted from the wake-up-from-sleep sequence. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
LocalHero1953 Posted June 24, 2015 Share #137 Posted June 24, 2015 I mean improvements in the next M, not the current one - so potentially with a new base plate. But what I had in mind was a system that woke up, took a shot, and stored it temporarily in on-board memory; concurrently, or just afterwards, it checks the SD card. Once the camera is sure that there is a card with space on it, then it downloads the image to the card. Frankly, I don't see this as rocket science. It just gets the card checking procedure off the critical path. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pico Posted June 24, 2015 Share #138 Posted June 24, 2015 While the following concerns the M9, perhaps someone with the 240 could try the same. Remove the SD card. (Replace the bottom plate or press the plate detection button.) Turn on the camera. A brief warning shows 'Attention. No SD card'. Regardless, take a few photos.You can review them with the Play function. Insert the SD card. The camera immediately writes the images to the card. Settings: DNG compressed only. No JPEG. When the SD card is not in the camera, Info shows nothing regarding remaining exposures, or space on the SD, so it is likely that the camera reads the SD card before making a picture, regardless of whether there is a card. (FWIW, my M9 has no start-up delay whatsoever. The camera is ready the moment it is turned on, card or no card.) Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
CheshireCat Posted June 24, 2015 Share #139 Posted June 24, 2015 initialisation comes before the camera commences normal operation. The only question is whether initialisation could not be sped up somehow. The question is: can SD initialization be done in parallel with normal camera operation (perhaps momentarily interrupted when the user takes a photo). And the answer is: yes. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pop Posted June 24, 2015 Share #140 Posted June 24, 2015 I did exactly that with my M (Typ 240): removed the card, reattached the bottom plate. The camera measures the exposure and releases the shutter. After taking each picture, both the optical viewfinder and the display on back of the camera warn me that there is no card present. Pressing the "Play"-Button does not show any picture at all. The warning about missing card (and missing base plate) disappear when I open the camera, insert a card, shut the camera. The LED indicates briefly that the camera accesses the card. The camera does not write any pictures to the card that were taken before the card was inserted. Pressing the "Play"-Button produces the message that there are no pictures to be displayed. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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