I have a Sony DSC-P10 5 mp camera and I am having problems getting the camera to take pictures rapidly....Does anyone have this camera or a Sony one similar? I am trying to get the autofocus to just shut off or to just take a photo within a second of pressing down the shutter button...but most of the time it takes a little while for it to work..... any ideas on how to make it faster?

does it not have the "half-press" of the shutter button to allow the autofocus to work prior to taking the picture?
Then its just a case of "half press" to focus the take to picture you want with the correct framing.

Either that or switch you camera to spot focus rather than the so called intelligent focusing.

i did that..but most of time it still takes forever....any other ideas?

If the half-press doesn't work, then your only other real option is to look at switching into manual focus mode (assuming it has such a thing). Maybe you can pre-focus with the half-press, then toggle the focus into manual mode, and then take a bunch of pictures in a row.

Try to focus on something with a lot of contrast, that often helps autofocus systems.

-Zeke

Remember that the autofocus is only one of two possible reasons that a camera might be slow to capture images. The second reason it might be slow is if it takes a long time to write the images out to flash RAM.

Generally, a camera will fill up its available fast internal RAM and then dump that cache out to the flash card. During that cache dump, it can't do anything.

My camera has a specific mode for taking rapid-fire pictures, where you hold down the shutter button and it goes click-click-click as fast as it can up until it needs to dump its cache. I think I have to specifically put it in that mode for it to work, I don't recall if it automatically does it if I just hold down the shutter button. But I know for sure that if I go click, release, click, release, it's dumping to the flash card each time and will definitely be slower than the fast click-click-click mode.

I think I read something about how some kinds of flash cards are faster than others, and that certain cameras can take advantage of this. Dunno if yours would or not, and I'm not entirely clear on how the feature works or if it even exists.

Following Tony, does your "slowness" occur before the picture is taken ("shutter lag") or after the picture is taken when you're trying to take a second photo? You can generally address the former problem with pre-focusing. The latter problem generally requires using smaller and/or lower quality JPEG files, or buying a faster memory card.

it is before the picture is taken....

Okay, then it's the autofocus doing it, yeah.

Most compact digital cameras are meant for non-photographers and therefore have an "always on" autofocus and no option to focus manually.

The only solution I've found is to anticipate, pre focus it, and wait for the action to take the final picture. I don't know if your camera works this way, but here's how it works for me:

I aim at the thing I want to photograph, then I half-depress the shutter button. At that point it does its autofocus and exposure setting, and waits for me to depress the shutter button all the way. I wait until the "event" happens (the kid swings at the softball, etc.) and press the button all the way down at that instant. It takes the picture instantly as long as the autofocus was completed and I didn't release the button.

You are not the only person experiencing this. Everyone who owns a digital camera complains about this. I've even seen magazine columnists complain about it. It's the price you pay for an auto-focus camera. The only way around it is to buy a camera with a manual focus ring and focus all your shots by hand.

You are not the only person experiencing this. Everyone who owns a digital camera complains about this. I've even seen magazine columnists complain about it. It's the price you pay for an auto-focus camera. The only way around it is to buy a camera with a manual focus ring and focus all your shots by hand.

Or a DSLR which will provide you with split second auto focus (with most lenses).

Sorry that I'm back on DSLRs again, but unless you have actually picked one up and used one you don't realise just how much faster they are at things like auto focusing.

I used to have to use the pre-focus and anticipate method all the time before I got my Canon 10D. Now I only have to resort to that when using my big 75-300mm lens, which is a lot slower to focus than most lenses (because it is cheap and is an aging design).

I keep meaning to get myself a "normal" digital camera for when I don't want to lug the 10D around. I have a play with friend's cameras occasionally and I'm always shocked by how slow they are at focusing and taking shots. The only ones I have found so far that are fast enough are the ones with fixed focus lenses. The Casio one (Casio EXILIM EX-S20) that I bought my father takes shots instantly (when the LCD screen is off) because it is fixed focus.

Sorry that I'm back on DSLRs again, but unless you have actually picked one up and used one you don't realise just how much faster they are at things like auto focusing.

I have, I did and they are. I'm just curious though, andy: If you had the decision to make all over again, would you still pay a little more for the 10D, or do you now think the 300 (Rebel) or -- horrors, man! -- Nikon D70 is a better deal?

P.S. *Still* awaiting Dapper DWallach's D70 debrief.....
Edit: Oops! Now I see where he's edited a previous post and done it already. Thanks, Dan!

I also just posted an addition to my original post that details why I think I'd been considering the focus system to be finicky.

In terms of Canon D-Rebel (a.k.a. 300D) vs. Canon 10D vs. Nikon D70, the question really comes down to what you want to do with the camera. As I see it, Nikon offers a wider variety of wide-angle lenses than Canon, many tailored to Nikon's "DX" sized sensor. Nikon also has a significantly more sophisticated flash system. Canon, on the other hand, has a wider variety of longer lenses, and more of Canon's lenses use the whizzy ultrasonic motors that make the autofocus fast and quiet. Nikon is catching up, but if you're looking at used telephoto lenses, this could be an advantage for Canon.

Another Nikon advantage seems to be the way that they buffer images on the way to the memory card. The Nikon will multitask whereas the Canons will lock up while writing bits out to the card. In practice, this makes the Nikon feel much, much faster, particularly if you (like me) insist on shooting RAW mode rather than JPEG.

On the other hand, the Canon D-Rebel kit is $300 cheaper than the Nikon D70 kit.

The Canon D-Rebel is primarily a cost-reduced Canon 10D. They cut several important features, such as adjusting flash output, which are standard features on cheaper Canon's like the G3. They also shrank the memory buffer. And, of course, they made the whole thing out of plastic. The 10D feels far more solid in your hand, but it also weighs a good bit more. On the other hand, the D-Rebel kit lens (18-55mm) gets you good wide-angle coverage which you can't cheaply get for a 10D.

For contrast, the D70 is a significant evolution over Nikon's earlier D100. In many senses, the D70 is really a cost-reduced D2H. Several reviewers have written that they prefer the D70 over the D100.

The rumor mill is spinning overtime about when Canon or Nikon will release successors to the 10D and D100, respectively. You can go to DPReview forums and read all the conjecture yourself. At this point, I'll bet that there will be no 10D or D100 replacement in the market until 2005, although you may see some price reductions.

So, in the end, you have to ask yourself what you want to do with your camera, and you need to consider that you're not just buying a Canon D-Rebel or Nikon D70, you're buying into the Canon system or the Nikon system. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and both are pretty damn good. I'd recommend the Canon or Nikon over any of the other D-SLR competitors such as the Sigma, Pentax, or Olympus offerings. Likewise, I think the low-end D-SLRs kits give you more for your money than the higher-end fixed-lens cameras like the Canon Pro1, the Sony F828, etc.

Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, "...on the one hand...on the other." - Harry S. Truman

If you had the decision to make all over again, would you still pay a little more for the 10D

Ah yes, good question.

I definitely wouldn't have bought the 300D (Rebel). It has just too many reduced features that I would miss over the 10D. The look of it also puts me off, it is going to look odd attached to large black lenses (I know looks shouldn't be high up the list on choosing a DSLR, but they are).

Would I have bought a Nikon D70. That one is a trickier question. I don't know much about the Nikon range of lenses, because when I was buying a DSLR there wasn't a Nikon body that I was considering. I get the feeling (possibly wrongly) that they don't have the same range of lenses at the price point I was looking at). I also get slightly put off by the feeling that the compatibility of Nikon lenses is confused, there seem to be some lenses in their range that you can use and some that you can't (though of course Canon have confused this as well now, with the EF-S that only the 300D can use).

If I was buying a DSLR now and was forced to buy it today it would probably be the 10D (but I would have to test out a D70 though to see how much faster it was). If however I was buying one and could wait a while then I wait to see what happened with the 10DII whenever it appears (has to appear this year surely).

I'm quite sure that the 10D replacement will be as good if not better than the Nikon D70 (all it really needs is faster operation and better white balance). No doubt at sometime in the future I'll buy a 10DII or 10DIII...

I do hope that one day Canon put a full frame sensor in a 10D sized camera. I would love full frame, but I don't think that I am not the only person who doesn't want to be stuck with a monster sized camera just so I can go full frame.

Oh, and please, please, please Canon can you put a permanently visible ISO display on all future cameras. I am fed up with taking shots at 1600 when I want 400 !

Canon did a risky thing at the dawn of autofocus by starting fresh and eliminating backward compatibility for their older lenses. Nikon, for contrast, allows all the ancient lenses to more-or-less work on modern hardware. This has created an alphabet soup of different Nikon lens standards that you need to at least vaguely understand if you want to buy used gear. Up until recently, Nikon went to great effort to make sure that new lenses worked well on ancient bodies. With the newest G-series lenses, this is no longer true. The Nikon G-series lenses no longer have an f-stop ring on them, so they require a newer body that can do all the adjustments electronically.

On the flip side, you apparent can still plug a very old manual focus lens into your modern Nikon D70. The main thing you're giving up is that you won't have any of the "CPU" functions. Or, in other words, the lens can't tell the camera "your subject is 10 feet away", which the flash system uses to adjust flash brightness. Of course, if you're using some ancient lens, you can't exactly expect to have all of the modern features.

If you're using a new body and a new lens, then you're pretty much in the same world as Canon people. One intriguing difference between Nikon and Canon is that Nikon has decided that they're apparently standardizing on the 1.5x multiplier for using smaller sensors. Canon seems to use a slightly different size sensor in each of their cameras. The benefit of Nikon forcing a standard size is that they can engineer new lenses around it. The Nikon 10.5mm fisheye, for example, is far smaller than a full-frame 10.5mm fisheye lens would otherwise be. This gives Nikon all the same benefits that Olympus talks about for their new 4:3 system lenses.

Canon, for contrast, only makes one lens tuned to smaller image formats, and that's the 18-55mm kit lens for the D-Rebel. Sigma just announced an intriguing 18-125mm lens that's also tuned for smaller image formats. If you're the sort of person who would have bought yourself a 28-200 lens for a 35mm camera, then Sigma has an answer for your Canon, Nikon, or other smaller-format D-SLR.

At the end of the day, you need to draw a picture of your platonic ideal camera. What features do you require today? What sort of expandability do you need in the future? Are you more interested in light weight or in heavy duty? How important is it for you to be able to rent exotic lenses? To purchase or sell gear on the used market? What's your budget? Etc., etc.

Just want to add that I think the 300D (Rebel) is an excellent camera. It clearly has the same excellent image quality as the 10D for less money. In the hands of a good photographer the 300D will produce the same results as a 10D in almost all circumstances.

When I say I never have bought the 300D I am lucky enough to do it with hindsight. I have owned the 10D for a year, so I know which functions I would miss. If I hadn't owned a 10D my choice might have been different if I were faced with choosing between 10D/300D/D70.

I have a Sony DSC-V1 which I wouldn't say is similar, but in any auto focus mode, when you press the shutter button halfway it takes it approx 2.5 secs to auto focus and take the shot. If you press the shutter button directly after the first shot it takes a further 2.5 secs to auto focus again and take the shot.

When I switch it to manual mode, I can get 2 -3 shots every second although this does depend on aperture priority, shutter speed, and focus settings. This was one of the main reasons I chose this camera, it's balance between auto settings and allowing full manual operation, and compact size.

Im not sure if the DSC-P10 allows to operate in manual mode, but it is the auto focus which is delaying you from taking rapid shots.

andy & DWallach --

Thanks go to you both for the lively discussion. It's been a help....