I hope i said what I mean. I am tired of trying to take pictures of grandkids and ending up with an empty picture, because they moved before the shutter released.
When you press the shutter release which camera takes the picture the quickest?

Are you limited to a type/price range?

Digital SLR's are near instantaneous (0.1-0.2 seconds for the mirror flip-up) and have shutter speeds up to 1/8,000 sec. But that's for a $1000 Nikon D70/Canon Rebel XT/etc.

Digital point-and-shoot are the ones that suffer from shutter lag - someone else will need to speak to those types.

mrs alect is a professional photographer - she uses a Nikon D100. Un-noticeable shutterlag.

She bought me a snap and shoot 6 megapixel Olympus C60 precisely due to its very low shutterlag (for a non-SLR digital). She's right - hence I defer to her on photographic matters even though i am more knowledgeable on electornics more genmerally. I have captured some amazing pictures of our 5 month old - eg first time eating food (not bottle).

I have a Sony DSC W-1 which is small and has good shutter lag (except when you use a flash - not sure if anyone can help you there), a really big LCD screen, and runs on AA batteries... I've really liked it's performance...

If you're looking for something cheaper/different, I found the following website to have good, objective test results of a lot of digital cameras: www.imaging-resource.com

Thanks for starting this thread.

BH Photo video does list shutter lag time on many of its cameras. If I recall, some of the compact Pentaxes and Casios were fast...but not fast enough!!

Remember that much of the shutterlag on point and shoots comes from the time the camera takes to focus. On my canon non-SLR, if you hold the button half way down, the camera will prefocus. This takes the shutter lag from about 1 second to about .2 seconds.

murphy beat me to it. I've solved the shutter lag problem this way, too. My 9 month old doesn't generally move fast enough to affect the focus, so as long as I press the button half way down, I'm almost always guaranteed to get the shot I want. Now if I could just convey this to Mrs. dchristiva, we'd have a lot less photos of my son with his eyes closed! Thank goodness the photos are all digital and not on film. That was getting to be expensive.

Most cameras also let you pre-set the shutter speed and ISO. You can pre-set these to higher numbers (400 should be more than sufficient for any portrait type shots and that should totally eliminate the blurriness. However, it will come at a slight cost in picture quality and the images will be slightly more grainy than usual.

That being said I'm going to have to throw in a pitch for any of the cameras in Canon's Powershot series. If your primary interest is personal photography, I would suggest a camera that's small and light like the SD300/400/500 (in ascending order of mega pixel and price), so you can take it with you all of the time. If you do a lot of vacation photography or like to zoom in, something like the S2 1S would be your best bet. If neither size nor zoom are a concern, and you're looking for a low cost option, the A500 is the way to go. Usually, digital SLRs are out of the price range for most personal photographers, and most people consider them too large to carry around on a regular basis. However, recently there have been a number of (comparatively) low end models released that are really quite nice like the Digital Rebel XT.

I hope that helps.

Yeah, I have been a powershot user for years, starting with the G1, then G2, then G3, then S45, S60 etc. Now, with a new SD400 just for traveling, I LOVE it.

Hey, DELL is having some smoking deals RIGHT NOW, A new 399$ powershot SD400 is only 309$, what with 15% off and a 30$ coupon.

checkout Techbargains.com. Anyone looking for a nice camera, TODAY is the day

DSLRs are the fastest and most expensive. The Olympus C8080 is very quick to turn on if you're looking for a prosumer model. The little Sony DSC-P150 is also very quick and quite small and significantly cheaper.

I've been a loyal Canon user for many years as well. I started out with an S300, a 3 mega pixel camera that came out a few years ago. Then I moved up to the S410 was the four megapixel model. After that, I decided I really was in love with digital photography and decided to splurge for (then) recently released entry level digital SLR: the Digital Rebel. I purchased the "kit"l which came with a terribly useless Canon D lens which I replaced in about a week. I sold my S300 and S410 on eBay (for roughly the purchase price minus the extras I included no less!) and bought an SD310 which I decided was finally small enough to justify carrying with me on a day to day basis. And finally, this past year for Christmas I was gifted a D20 (also recently released) which is a few steps up from the digital rebel and only one step down from the full metal bodied "real" pro digital SLRs which run upwards of 8k

Since then, my interest in photography has blossomed. I just picked up an academic version of Adobe's Creative Suite 2 and I am having a blast going through all my old pictures (over 4,000!) and giving them brush ups so I finally feel they're worthy of being sent off to the printer (I prefer Sony Imagestation, they have fantastic prices (19 cents normally for a 4x6, on sale now for 17 cents, and 8x10s normally 3.49$ now on sale for 2.44$). My family sent our it�s Christmas cards for the first time this year without going to a studio, and I was happy to be a part of that effort ^ . I've also had the chance to take some rather stunning natural photography on vacation. To be honest, and I know this sounds more like a paid product endorsement than a FT post but none of that would've been possible without my purchase of a digital camera and Canon in particular.

Another huge part of it, often the majority, comes from the red-eye reduction pre-flash along with the wait for the subject's pupils to contract before the "real" flash goes off and the picture is taken. Cameras I've seen let you turn this off.

I'm a big fan of Canon also. I haven't really tested shutter speed (I normally take pictures of buildings which don't move much), but my S500 has a quick photo mode, so I assume it's good for that. There's also an action shot mode which I used on my G2 that allows multiple shots to be taken quickly in succession. You can try that and pick the best one from the series of shots.

My husband, a professional filmmaker, gave me a Sony DSC-T3/T33 for Easter. Newest version, I think. Cybershot. I wanted something tiny, big viewing screen, high resolution, plus choices for less resolution to fit more on card, but mostly a very fast shutter speed for obvious reasons. It seems to have them all in a cool package. BUT, first camera had a glitch and flash wouldn't work after 2 days. Second one has been perfect. Local dealer matched B & H prices, but we usually buy from them.