SL2-S buffer is only 50 images in reality

[beewee]

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11 minutes ago, syd said:

Whether it's a bug or a engineering decision, who's to know? For me, it's disappointing more so because it's not disclosed anywhere in the specifications.

I think this there’s a difference between a bug and an engineering decision. A bug implies that the intended feature (i.e. buffer clearing) is not operating as expected in a certain situation.

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[syd]

Agree. But there's nowhere in the documentation that says this is not the intended behaviour.

[fzero]

I have the sl and sl2. With a manual focus lens, and plenty of shutter speed, regardless of which shutter mode I choose, the max frame burst is 26 DNG in burst mode on the SL2 and not much more on the SL. On the SL2 in jpeg I get more like 50 frames - that's it. PCMag wrote about the buffer in their review as the following, which is accurate against my tests...

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The camera has some impressive burst shooting capabilities too. It can fire off shots at 20fps with the fully electronic shutter, and manages a little bit better than 10fps with the mechanical shutter. But the SL2 locks focus in for a sequence, so if you're trying to capture a moving subject, you'll get a speedy burst of misfocused images. The buffer is good for about 30 Raw or Raw+JPG shots, or about 50 JPGs, and requires about 30 seconds to clear to a 300MBps memory card when shooting Raw and 15 seconds when working in JPG format.

You'll need to drop to the medium burst rate for the SL2 to acquire focus for every shot. Doing so slows the capture rate to a more down-to-earth 5.8fps. It does well locking onto a target as it moves away and toward the lens.

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It's good to hear the SL2-S is better, but none of them are action cameras - in my experience of shooting with them, they just can't shoot a burst and clear the memory fast enough to resume - at least for me. Shoot in burst mode at 10fps for a couple seconds, and then you have to wait 10-30 seconds to shoot more? Whatever you were trying to catch is long gone, and the AF can't keep up at all either.

[_Michael]

On 2/2/2021 at 2:03 AM, FlashGordonPhotography said:

Just shoot video and pull frames. Same thing. Not really photography though.

Gordon

I was going to say exactly the same thing. 
 

I’ve shoot hundreds of thousands of sports images. Mix of sports, plenty of fast action. I cannot remember a single situation where I would need 25fps rates outside of video. Plenty of short busts but rarely more than 8 or 10. 

I get the notion of holding a mfg to what they state in specifications. I am curious what the use case is for this kind of frame rate and buffer in stills photography.  I replied after only seeing the first page of comments so this might already be discussed. 

[beewee]

1 hour ago, _Michael said:

I cannot remember a single situation where I would need 25fps rates outside of video. Plenty of short busts but rarely more than 8 or 10. 

I remember many years ago being at a wetland/nature reserve shooting birds with a super-tele on a Canon 5D II using center point focus and single shot mode for birds in the water. The guy next to me had some other super-tele and a Nikon D2 or D3 gunning away at 10 FPS for 2-3 seconds at a time shooting stationary birds. 🤣 I can’t imagine having to comb through 20-30 images of the same burst for a shot.

Edited March 30, 2021 by beewee

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On 2/3/2021 at 3:24 AM, syd said:

Still waiting - I've prodded.

Already a reaction from Leica?

[LD_50]

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5 hours ago, _Michael said:

I was going to say exactly the same thing. 
 

I’ve shoot hundreds of thousands of sports images. Mix of sports, plenty of fast action. I cannot remember a single situation where I would need 25fps rates outside of video. Plenty of short busts but rarely more than 8 or 10. 

I get the notion of holding a mfg to what they state in specifications. I am curious what the use case is for this kind of frame rate and buffer in stills photography.  I replied after only seeing the first page of comments so this might already be discussed. 

The ability to pull the best shot from what is essentially a video gives you a much better chance at the best possible final product. I don’t enjoy this workflow though. 

If I was needing to make money in a competitive environment with other photographers present I could see this type of feature being an advantage. 

My iPhone does something similar, take a single shot and you can later scroll through a “live” video for the best frame. It works very well but feels less like photography. The key to this being useful on the phone is the way the software handles it. You don’t have to later manage a large series of images. It feels like a single shot that you can edit. I don’t see the same for high frame rate cameras and I’m not interested. 

 

[_Michael]

5 hours ago, LD_50 said:

The ability to pull the best shot from what is essentially a video gives you a much better chance at the best possible final product. I don’t enjoy this workflow though. 

If I was needing to make money in a competitive environment with other photographers present I could see this type of feature being an advantage. 

My iPhone does something similar, take a single shot and you can later scroll through a “live” video for the best frame. It works very well but feels less like photography. The key to this being useful on the phone is the way the software handles it. You don’t have to later manage a large series of images. It feels like a single shot that you can edit. I don’t see the same for high frame rate cameras and I’m not interested. 

 

I understand where you are coming from there, I guess my take would be a bit different given the inherent limitations of the SL system, focus modes, etc. This is the wrong tool to pick a single image from 50 in a 2 second period. Just switch it to video mode in the body and be done.  This would Imply a rapidly moving subject and a focus system that could keep up with it.  Having culled through far too many images from events I used to shoot I know it's no easy task. 

No fault in understanding the mismatch between specifications and reality. I hope the answers are found. 

 

[Photoworks]

what is the point on picking from video if you loose the the DNG option and full resolution of the camera?

[Vlad Kuzemchik]

Based on my testing the 50 images limit is only on Very High Speed mode.

High Speed and others gives me 54 images in DNG + JPEG and 61 DNG only. And it writes while I shoot. This probably makes sense because I would assume they are storing uncompressed raw and maybe JPEGs into separate section in the buffer.

Very High Speed + DNG Only: 25fps*50mb(uncompressed 16bit + overhead/metadata)=1.2GBps. Even with writing to two very best SD cards (~300MBps) at the same time you still will be writing with half of the speed necessary.

So my assumption is that Leica SL2-s pre-allocate buffer for 50 shots to make sure there is no slowdown on buffer side, and not allowing to shoot more unless sequential part of buffer is cleared to shoot to that section of buffer again. They probably could squeeze a bit more since the buffer is 4GB, but it probably would be uneven number and look weird. Here you get 2 seconds of 25fps consistently if you clear your buffer. Basically they chose predictability for this mode.

All other modes are basically limited by the card speeds. I don't have 2 high speed cards but I was able to get 3 continuous fps on my single ProGrade v90 (BM Disk tester showed ~200MBps) write card.

I would assume that with two faster cards (something like AngelBird or Sony Tough) in parallel write mode would give 10fps (High Speed) continuously. But I didn't test that.