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Taking Photos Faster with DSLRs

dslrman — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:00:33 +0000

Everything about a digital SLR seems to work more quickly and responsively.That’s important when you want to make a grab shot on the spur of the moment, or expect the camera to take an action photo right now when you press the shutter release at the peak moment. Most point-and-shoot digital cameras are downright sluggardly compared to dSLRs when it comes to performance. You can find improved speed in three key areas, which I explain in the following sections.

Wake-up time
A non-SLR digicam that can be powered up and ready to snap its first photo in as little as two seconds is considered fast. Many take three to four seconds to emerge from their slumber. Worse, because they consume so much power,these cameras go into stand-by mode or shut off completely if you don’t take a picture for 30 to 60 seconds.

When you flip the power switch of a dSLR, the camera is usually ready to take the picture before you can move the viewfinder up to your eye. Some are ready to go in 0.2 of a second! Digital SLRs don’t need to go to sleep,either, because they consume so little power when not in active use. I’ve left dSLRs switched on for days at a time with little perceptible draining of the battery.Certainly, the autofocus and autoexposure mechanisms go on standby a few seconds after you move your finger from the shutter release, but they’re available again instantly with a quick tap on the button.

Shot-to-shot time
Conventional digital cameras have limits on how quickly you can take pictures in succession. Unless you’re using the motor-drive-like burst mode, one shot every second or two is about all you can expect. Even in burst mode,you’re lucky to get much more than about 1 frame per second for 5 to 11 shots, max.

Digital SLRs have large amounts of built-in memory that temporarily stores each photo you snap before the camera transfers it to your memory card at high speed. You can probably take pictures in single-shot mode as quickly as you can press the shutter release, and for at least eight to ten shots before a slight pause kicks in. With faster dSLRs and some quality level settings, you can often keep taking pictures for as long as your finger (or memory card) holds out.

A DSLR’s burst mode can capture 3 to 8 frames per second for 12 to 30 shots,depending on the speed of the camera and the quality level you’ve chosen;lower quality (higher compression) settings produce smaller images that can be written to the memory card faster. No point-and-shoot camera comes anywhere close to that level of performance.

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Two Types of DSLR Sensors

dslrman — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:04:22 +0000

Two main types of sensors are used in digital SLRs today: CCD (charge coupled device) and CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) imagers. Although each type of sensor uses different technology to capture images, there’s no inherent quality difference between them. Some vendors, including Sony, Pentax/Samsung, and Nikon, make great dSLRs based on CCDtechnology. Fujifilm’s latest dSLR uses what it describes as a SuperCCD sensor. But Nikon also offers dSLRs built around CMOS sensors (fabricated by Sony), so it’s logical to expect Sony to blossom into the CMOS arena, too. Firmly in the CMOS camp are Canon and Sigma. Note that although the Foveon sensor used in Sigma cameras is.

Both CCD and CMOS imagers use metal-oxide semiconductors (although,apparently, the CMOS type is more complementary), and they have about the same degree of sensitivity to light. The main difference is in what each type sensor does with the light after capturing it:

The CCD sensor
is “dumb” to the extent that all it does is capture photons as electrical charges in each photosite/pixel. After exposure, the charges are swept off the chip to an amplifier located in one corner of the sensor. External circuitry converts the analog signal to digital form and handles storing it on your memory card.
A CMOS sensor,
theoretically, is a lot more complicated than its CCD counterpart. It includes solid-state circuitry at each and every photosite and can manipulate the data for each pixel right in the sensor. That’s pretty cool because it gives the CMOS sensor the ability to respond to lighting conditions in ways that a CCD can’t. However, sweeping all the photon information off a CMOS chip isn’t necessary; every photosite can be accessed individually.

Some interesting components are piled on top of both sensor types. These components include

Color filters, which give the color-blind CCD and CMOS chips the ability to respond to various colors of light.
Teensy microlenses that focus the incoming light onto the photosensitive area in each photo site.
A protective transparent layer that contains a special filter (an antialiasing filter) that smooths out the incoming light signal by eliminating certain frequencies of light before they can clash. This layer also includes an infrared cutoff filter that removes most of the IR light component from the illumination reaching the sensor (because so-called “IRcontamination” can affect image quality and produce off-color colors).

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Nikon D3000 10MP Digital SLR Camera with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S DX VR Nikkor Zoom Lens

dslrman — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:02:28 +0000

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