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M9 shutter lag?


aesop

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I'm a Nikon guy, but it never occured to me that the M9 was slow.

 

Obviously, it's not a high speed camera like your typical pro DSLR body (and it shouldn't be) - but I never noticed any shutter lag.

 

My M9 review: Leica M9 - love at first light

 

Jarle

 

Absolutely agree. I use a D3, which has a negligible shutter lag. I have not notice a long shutter lag with the M9. I use disc/soft and disregard shutter noise.

 

However, this thread got me wondering how long is the lag? So, I did a quick test. My very unscientific method was to take a picture of my IPOD stopwatch, starting the stopwatch and depressing the shutter at the same time. I repeated the test 30 times and got reading between .2 and .4 seconds. Syncing the two operations was a little more difficult that I thought. But, it gave me a sense of the lag. It definitely slow than my D3. However, it is pleny fast enough.

 

The M9 isn't a sports camera. It is what it is (very philosophic) and all the false praise or misguided criticism won't change this reality.

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I know that it might be fun to be able to say that 'My camera is faster than your camera' etc. But in the real world, how many of you can honestly claim that they missed a shot due the 'shutter-lag' of your camera?

 

Even taking the 2 second warm-up time of the M7 as an example. How many can switch the camera on, raise the camera to your eye, compose and focus in under 2 seconds? And this is assuming that you had pre-set the exposure too.

 

Don't fret about a millisecond here or there. For those times where a split second is important, with a little bit of practice, you can learn to anticipate the correct moment to release the shutter in the same way as you learn to lead a moving target when shooting.

 

Relax and enjoy the experience of using a fine precision tool to make your photographs. :)

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James R's technique is the best I've seen published for really testing shutter lag, although the times seem a bit long. Was that done with manual or autoexposure? And with the regular release including AE lock, or the "soft" relaese option?

 

My M9 gave me no problems capturing the moment I was after in this "Happy New Year" series of pictures: http://www.coloradoseen.com/index/denver-welcomes-2010/

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  • 5 months later...

The issue, as I see it is does shutter lag time make a difference. Clearly for some the answer is yes, while for others it's no. What are we to make of this?

 

I can report that I notice the difference in shutter lag time between my M6, M3, Model A (1929), and my Rolleiflex compared to my 5D, not based on the way the cameras sound but based on reviewing my images: I get more "hits" with the Leicas and the Rollei.

 

For those who don't find shutter lag in the M9 to be a problem, I'm glad they're happy, but that it works for them may not apply to me. I may have a chance to use an M9 on a trial basis in a few weeks, so I'll be able to confirm whether its shutter lag makes a difference for the kind of work I do. If I notice that I miss shots, I'll wait for the M10.

 

This discussion would be very different if shutter lag times had gone from 100ms to 10ms rather than the reverse. I can't imagine anyone being disappointed with shorter lag times.

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A Leica M is not a machine gun and the decisive moment is the decisive moment. If you cannot see it you cannot shoot and if you can see it but your mirror moves you cannot shoot either, it's as simple like that.

 

Well, if we're going to be really pedantic..... it's more like you see the decisive moment, you press the shutter, the camera fails to respond for several seconds because it's writing the previous image, the shutter fires and you have a lovely image of what happened quite a long time after the decisive moment. :D

 

Don't take the above too seriously - but unfortunately this was pretty much my experience of the M8. All too easy to fill the buffer and render the camera temporarily useless.

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In my experience the shutter release is virtually instantaneous. Filling up the buffer does only become an issue after firing away about seven shots at top speed (where top speed for the M9 is about 1.6 fps), so in most cases it is not an issue either. The buffer seems to hold less images at slower shutter speeds (below 1/125 I believe).

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but that isn't shutter lag, it's a consequence of digital capture. Try RAW only, it doesn't waste time converting to jpeg.

 

John

 

I agree - it's not shutter lag. But that wasn't the point I was making. I went moderately off-topic for the sake of humour :-)

 

It's not a consequence of digital capture as far as I know ('cos it doesn't happen with my other digital cameras). Rather it's a consequence of Leica's chosen image processing implementation. And I agree RAW makes processing faster, but it doesn't solve the problem in and of itself. I always shoot RAW only and can flood the buffer all too easily. Rarely with my personal work when I can take my time, but quite often when shooting weddings.

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  • 7 months later...

I have a theory about why some claim to experience no shutter lag with the M9 while there clearly is some. Even at very fast shutter speeds, the shutter sound actuates immediately, but sounds like the slower shutter speed (maybe 1/8 sec.) of an older mechanical camera (described previously in this thread as "ch-chunk"). I bet that, regardless of whatever causes the initial sound, the actual shutter doesn't fire until the end of this sound. This creates the impression that the shutter has fired immediately, while in fact incorporating a lag.

 

Although this hasn't been a huge problem, I have missed a couple of good facial expressions and had action frozen late in the frame because of it.

 

- David

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I read what you are saying David, but can't resist asking the question, "Was the lag that missed the shot attributable to the camera, or your reaction?" ;)

 

Said half in jest, half as a serious question.

 

P.S. I think that can only truly be answered by a carefully controlled, measured test.

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