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Shutter lag is the time between the moment you press the shutter button and the moment the camera takes the photo. While a modern DSLR exhibits almost no shutter lag, the same is not true for compact digital cameras. In fact, on some digital point-and-shoots, the lag can be as much as one second.

Now, one second doesn’t sound like a lot, especially when you consider that many processes take place in that one second. Once the user begins pressing the shutter button, the processor in the camera has to work out the distance to the subject, determine the light (or lack of), correctly set the white balance and balance the color and so forth. Quite a lot happens in that one second.

As I just mentioned, one second doesn’t sound like a lot, but suppose you’re taking photo’s at your son’s soccer game. Your son is about to kick the ball, you raise the camera and press the shutter as the ball is kicked. One second later, the photo is actually recorded by the sensor, but by that time the ball (and perhaps your son) are no longer in the frame. Oops.

Unfortunately, camera companies are not much help here. While they do recognise that shutter lag can be a problem, in most cases they don’t publish any shutter lag data in the spec sheets for a camera. And, in the real world, shutter lag specs have yet to be standardised, so even when you can find out what the shutter lag is of a particular camera, it’s hard to compare it to other cameras because they may be using different parameters to measure the lag.

With technology improving and prices dropping, shutter lag will one day (hopefully) be a thing of the past. But until then, it’s worth paying attention to next time you’re shopping for a digital camera.

A handy table comparing shutter lag in various cameras is available on the cameras.co.uk site. And the New York Times has a good article that can be found here.