Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

There's two things I care about in a digital camera: low light performance, and dynamic range. I don't care about how much megapixels you can cram in there - if your lens is pixel-perfect, 6 is enough for most purposes anyway. The only reason I might want to upgrade from my Canon 40D is a drastically improved dynamic range, a compacter size and the ability to shoot movies. So far it's all not quite there yet to be worth it, from my point of view.

Plus, I'm having more fun developing my pictures taken with my Nikon FM2 anyway.

Ironically, recenty the Nokia approach with supersampling seems to have paid off most regarding low-light and dynamic range performance of phone cameras (especially dynamic range, which this article didn't address). I hope the others will catch up.

View on HN

And shutter lag. There is nothing worse than missing every single shot (or having them all blurry) because the shutter took too long.

Is this still an issue? I can't recall using a camera made in the last 6 years that didn't take the picture near-instantly so long as you did the normal half-press prefocus, or used manual focus.

"Is this still an issue? I can't recall using a camera made in the last 6 years that didn't take the picture near-instantly so long as you did the normal half-press prefocus, or used manual focus."

This is absolutely still an issue. Go to your local camera store and play around with even a low-end 'fast' camera such as the Canon 7D and you'll see in no uncertain terms just how fast good SLRs are. Even Micro 4/3 cameras are catching up now.

Shutter latency is the single thing keeping point and shoot cameras, or smartphone cameras, from truly dominating.

Er, they already "truly dominate" by most metrics.

The point is they also dominate in a metric where they shouldn't: the number of 'missed moments'. I can't count how many pictures I simply discard because they were taken 1/4 second after the point in time where they should have been. I keep trying but it's a constant source of frustration.

The best camera is the one you have with you.

How many "missed moments" were due to having left you camera in the car or at home?

I use SLR's pretty commonly, and I'm not sure how a 4/3's camera would be different given that as far as I'm aware they use a contrast-detection system that uses separate AF sensors, and not the imaging sensor. That's probably different for EVIL cameras, though.

Maybe we mean different things, though. There is a time between the half-press of the shutter and obtaining focus, and that can be half a second to several seconds depending on conditions. I don't consider that shutter lag, though - is this what you're referring to? I mean the time it takes to go from that half-press to a full press and capture the image.

On a 5 year old cheap Panasonic pocket camera I find that this time, half-press to full-press, is nearly imperceptible. Maybe I'm just fortunate, or not as discerning, though.

I disagree with lordbusiness - disregarding focusing time (as previous poster said, "half-press" the shutter first), EVIL/mirrorless cameras are going to be faster than SLRs unless incompetently engineered.

There are outliers like the NEX-5 which had a shutter lag of over 100ms, even when pre-focused, but the modern mirrorless equivalents of the 7D achieve less shutter lag.

A DSLR has the intrinsic problem of having to wait for the mirror to move out of the way before the image can be captured. The mirror mechanism's speed is limited by the strength and flexibility of its materials (too fast and it'll break), and the power level of the actuator moving it. Not to mention the faster you move the mirror the more slap you will get, causing vibrations in the camera that affect image quality. There is a "limit of physics and material science" problem inherent in SLRs.

A mirrorless camera has none of these disadvantages - and it shows, even the vaunted Canon 1D has a shutter lag between 40-50ms depending on model, while the Sony NEX-5N has a shutter lag of 22ms.

The Canon 7D lordbusiness brings up clocks in at ~70ms. In fact none of Canon's DSLRs can get below 40ms.

The Olympus E-M1 comes in at 50ms, as is the Fuji X-T1. Mirrorlesses already outperform even high-end DSLRs when it comes to shutter lag. And they will continue to get faster as more mirrorlesses move to electronic instead of mechanical shutters.

Perhaps, but calling a 7D "low end" is odd given that it's the flagship crop format camera usually costing well over $1500.

Shutter latency is the single thing keeping point and shoot cameras, or smartphone cameras, from truly dominating.

That depends on the use case. A couple years ago I took a train ride across the country, taking photos from the observation car with a P&S camera. The shutter latency was absolutely infuriating.

On the other hand, when I'm doing a landscape on a tripod with remote shutter release, I wouldn't even notice if it took an extra second or two.

IMHO, the biggest thing is control, of which shutter latency is just one facet. All the other stuff about aperture, ISO sensitivity, pre-focus, etc. come into play in various use cases.

Absolutely. Nothing beats an old fashioned film based camera with the shutter pre-wound (yes, that's hell on the shutter life but it makes for it up with all those moments you caught instead of missed).

Just switching the camera 'on' takes too much time.

I don't really believe that shutter-lag is such an issue that it gives film camera's a defining edge.

My M3 lags 16ms, but you need to focus it yourself obviously, my flagship Canon is slower at 40ms, but has autofocus and hammers out images at an insane amount per second.

My fuji viewfinder cam is infuriatingly slow compared to the beast above, but I feel I have only myself to blame for any missed moments.

Well, mechanical optical stabilization helps.

Mechanical optical stablization does not help with shutter lag. It helps if the camera is moving during the shot, but it does not compensate for the delay between when you wanted to take the shot and when your smartphone actually took the shot, which can result in the shot being missed, or the shot being blurry because the subject started moving.

Right, I somehow managed to misread that post. Yeah, that happens fairly often on the 1020 (not so much on 808 I think).

Yep. Nothing worse than bringing up the camera when you need it most and all you see is a black screen or the phone restarts. I'm talking about you iPhone!!!

I doubt super-sampling beats Google's HDR+ [1] in either range or speed (the 1020 takes about 4 seconds per "normal" picture). The 1020 does have much better details and such, but that's most likely due to a 4x bigger sensor and higher quality lens.

[1] - http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and...

Those 4 seconds are due to post-processing one sensor image. Google's HDR+ combines multiple images in a novel way to create a higher dynamic range. In theory you could use that with the Nokia camera as well.

Of course, that would slow it down even further.

>The only reason I might want to upgrade from my Canon 40D is a drastically improved dynamic range, a compacter size and the ability to shoot movies. So far it's all not quite there yet to be worth it, from my point of view.

There are modern high-megapixel sensors (2-3x) in much more compact cameras with 2-3x the high-ISO performance and 2-3 stops more dynamic range. If that's not a drastic improvement what is?

http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Compare/Side-by-side/Sony-A60...

The idea that the MP race has given us worse cameras seems very prevalent but doesn't seem to be based on fact. The current crop of Sony full-frame sensors shows that very well:

http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Compare/Side-by-side/Sony-A7S...

The 36MP sensor is better in all respects than the 24MP one. The 12MP sensor has great high-iso performance at the cost of resolution, dynamic range and color quality.

It's a drastic improvement for sure, but is it worth the new investment for a non-professional?

Only you can answer that for yourself. I have a Sony A700 which is very similar to the 40D in both sensor performance and features:

http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Compare/Side-by-side/Sony-A7R...

I could definitely use the 2 stops more dynamic range and the 5x high-iso performance for day to day shooting. I'd love to have the good video as well sometimes. The 3x resolution wouldn't be too bad either from time to time, although it would take a bigger toll on the processing side (storage for the files and CPU usage for the raw conversion).

Take a look at the Sony A7S, it's dynamic range and low light performance are quite impressive. Reviewers seem impressed with it's video capabilities as well, though I only shoot stills.

and autofocus systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com