Leejay -
You're right, there was something very odd about the E-3 timing results. I was working with the camera today, working on another part of its review, and felt that it just was *not* as slow as it had been testing. So I went down to the lab, fired up the lag tester, and... it tested slow. Went back up to my office, played with it some more - doggone it, it was fast, not slow. Back down to the lab, it was slow again. What??? - Thought I must be hallucinating.
I finally tracked down what was going on, it takes the prize for the weirdest timing issue of the year. It turns out that the E-3 has a "finger detector" of some sort in its shutter button. For whatever reason, when your finger is in contact with the shutter button (note that it doesn't have to be actually pressing on it), the camera is in a "primed" state, from which it can shoot with a full-AF shutter lag on the order of 0.135 - 0.140 second. If you *don't* have your finger on the button ahead of time though, but rather just jab it from above, it takes more like the 0.29 second we'd previously measured. It turned out that the button on our timer apparatus wasn't triggering the finger detector, so we were very consistently getting the slower numbers.
This seemed so strange that I tested and re-tested multiple times, probably spent a couple of hours all told today, fiddling with the silly thing. The bottom line though, was that it was absolutely consistent: Finger on the button, lag = ~0.135 second. Finger off the button, lag = ~0.29 second.
So, while our methodology and statistics were absolutely consistent, the *camera* was different, in a way we hadn't seen before. (Just one more thing we'll have to check for on every camera in the future. :-0
The good news, of course, is that most photographers will have their finger at least resting on the button when getting ready to shoot, so they'll see the faster performance. What isn't clear is whether wearing gloves might leave you with the slower performance. I've spent enough time on it today though, so am not going to dig out a pair of gloves to test with. (Cotton or leather? Chrome-tanned leather or suede? etc, etc.)
- Dave E.
