AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Listen Print Discuss
Mac OS X > Excerpts >

End of Shutter Lag? The Contax SL300R T* Might Be the Sign of Good Things to Come

by Derrick Story
03/09/2004

I am a big fan of digital point-and-shoot cameras, and usually have one with me wherever I go. Most of today's pocketables feature 3- or 4-megapixel resolution, quality optics, lots of handy functions ... and an annoying dose of shutter lag. You know, the demon that delays capturing the decisive moment until it's no longer decisive. Shutter lag is the number one complaint I receive about pocketable digicams in my photo workshops.

My hope has always been that shutter lag is just an annoying stop along digital photography's evolutionary path. It's like that coffee shop in the middle of nowhere where the service is way too slow.

Fortunately, the pace is picking up. All of the big camera makers seem focused on improving performance. At the moment, Kyocera has forged ahead of the pack with a technology called RTUNE that not only shortens shutter lag, but enables you to capture images at more than 3 frames per second until the memory card is full. As an added benefit, you can record 640 x 480 QuickTime movies at 30fps. They've packed all of this power into cameras that barely bulge the shirt pocket.

When I attended the Photo Marketing Association show in Las Vegas last month, a stop at the Kyocera booth was high on my To Do list. I spent some time testing the cameras that have RTUNE, including the FINECAM SL300R, the FINECAM S5R, and my personal favorite of the bunch, the Contax SL300R T*, which is the subject of today's testing.

The Contax SL300R T* is a 3.2-megapixel shirt pocket digicam that weighs 4.4 ounces (125 grams). In addition to RTUNE technology, the camera includes a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* zoom lens (38mm - 115mm equivalent), 1.5" DayFine LCD (works in bright sunlight), SD memory card capability, filter adapter, lens hood, and a magnesium alloy body that twists for a variety of camera shooting angles. It is almost the exact same length and width as an iPod, but thinner and weighs less.

The Contax SL300R T*
The Contax SL300R T* with SanDisk Ultra II high speed SD memory card.

The electronics in the Contax are essentially the same as the Kyocera FINECAM SL300R. If you find yourself tempted by this review of the Contax, but don't want to pay the premium $499 price tag for it, you can buy the Kyocera model for over $100 less. You don't get the Carl Zeiss lens and the leather exterior, but you do get the body design and RTUNE image processing. Kyocera has also announced a 4-megapixel version of the FINECAM "twister," so you might want to investigate that one, too.

Related Reading

Digital Photography Hacks
100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
By Derrick Story


Read Online--Safari Search this book on Safari:
 

Code Fragments only

I will talk more about the specific camera features later in the article, but to begin I want to explore RTUNE and see if it indeed leaves shutter lag in the dust.

What Is RTUNE and How Does it Work?

Apparently the Contax is an adept multitasker. Kyocera's Rapid Tuning technology takes advantage of parallel processing to essentially eliminate the need for an image buffer. As you take pictures, the information is processed in real-time and sent to both the memory card and the LCD monitor. That's right, as you're clicking away at 3+ frames per second, the image is displayed on your monitor at that same rate. There isn't monitor blackout while the camera processes the image. This is incredible to experience firsthand. I found myself shooting a few hundred frames just for the fun of it.

An important component in this process is the memory card itself. To reap the benefits of RTUNE, you need to use a high-speed memory card such as the SanDisk Ultra II SD card that has a sustained write speed of 9 MBs per second. Kyocera states that any SD card that can maintain a speed of 7.7 MBs per second will work with their RTUNE technology. Lexar and Panasonic also make compatible memory for the Contax.

The card literally becomes part of the equation as data is pipelined to it from the processor. The bad news is that you have to add the price of one or more of these high-speed cards to the overall cost of the camera. I've been using 256MB Ultras ($85 each) because I can get two of them cheaper than one 512MB card ($200 each). In fact, Contax doesn't bother to include any media card with the camera (I guess there's no such thing as a high-speed 16MB card), so be sure to figure in one or two Ultras for the total price of this camera.

RTUNE provides more than just fast frame rate. The camera processes much of the image information at the analog stage first, before converting it to a digital signal. Kyocera claims that this improves how the picture looks, too. Image noise, for example, is reduced by first adjusting RGB colors at 16 bits before outputting it digitally at 12 bits.

In my own informal testing I found that there seems to be some truth to this claim, as long as you keep your ISO setting to 100. When you boost the ISO to 200, 400, or 800, image noise seemed about the same as most other high-end digicams.

Take a look at this picture I took at the O'Reilly campus recently, on a beautiful day following a Pacific storm. The image was captured by hand-holding the Contax at ISO 100 with the aperture set at f-7.5.


Photo captured with Contax SL300R T* at ISO 100.

I then opened the picture to 100 percent in Photoshop and cropped out a 320 x 240 rectangle from the sky. As you know, sky is one of the easiest areas to detect image noise, especially when viewing the picture on a high-resolution computer monitor at 100 percent. If you look at the cropped segment of the sky, you'll see that there isn't much image noise, and that the quality is quite good.


A 320 x 240 crop of the sky (at 100 percent to inspect for image noise).

Another area where I noticed this robust image-processing was when analyzing the 640 x 480 movies shot with the Contax at 30fps. Video captured in good lighting revealed tremendous detail in each frame. Quite an accomplishment for a camera only 6mm thick that fits in your top shirt pocket.

RTUNE also shortens startup time to what Kyocera claims is less than a second. I have to admit startup is darn fast. In fact, one of the great ironies is that you have the option to set a custom startup screen for the Contax. The only problem is that the startup screen is subliminal at best, and only appears for the blink of an eye before the camera is ready for action.

But the real biggie is shutter lag itself. Kyocera says that they've reduced shutter lag to 0.07 seconds. Technically that may be true, but in real-world use the camera still has to focus and determine exposure before recording the image.

I decided to put the Contax up against the Canon PowerShot S400, an excellent pocketable digicam in its own right. The Contax has faster startup time and definitely outperforms the Canon in burst mode (including not blacking out the monitor as the Canon does during firing), but the shutter lag competition was a closer contest.

The S400's 9-point AiAF auto-focus system combined with DIGIC processing enabled the camera to lock in on the subject quickly and fire off a fast exposure, sometimes beating the Contax to the punch. A good performance indeed by Canon.

This scenario changed however when I turned off auto-focusing, by putting both cameras in Landscape mode (locking the focus at infinity). This is when RTUNE processing power prevailed and the Contax consistently fired off an exposure before the Canon S400.

The bottom line, however, is that there's more to shutter lag than just image processing. How fast the camera focuses and determines exposure seems as important as image processing speed. Maybe this is one of the reasons that Kyocera has included a full manual focusing mode for the Contax, enabling you to set and lock in the focus at any distance. Once you do this, RTUNE takes over and produces extremely fast performance.

But for everyday shooting with auto-focus turned on, high-end digicams such as the Canon S400 compare favorably with the Contax. All of today's top camera makers are striving to provide relief from shutter lag. To do so requires improvement in all areas of the picture-taking sequence. If for example, you could combine Canon's speedy focusing with Kyocera's image processing, you'd have one hot little digicam.

Other Features of the Contax SL300R T*

I've been carrying around the Contax to test its performance in different lighting situations. But along the way I've enjoyed getting to know some of its other features.


The Contax comes with an adapter ring to mount 28mm filters.

This camera definitely has personality. Here are some of the things that I find quite charming.

  • DayFine LCD Monitor -- If you don't provide an optical viewfinder, as Kyocera doesn't here, then your LCD better be good. The DayFine is darn good and viewable in all types of lighting situations.
  • Multiple Shooting Angles -- The twist design is great for holding the camera at waist level or over your head for a variety of shooting angles. You can even turn the lens around for self portraits, and see yourself in the monitor while doing so.
  • Aperture Priority at f-2.8 and f-7.5 -- If you want to control your depth of field, you need to be able to set the aperture. The Contax allows you to choose either f-2.8 (wide open for reduced depth of field) or f-7.5 (closed down for extended depth).
  • Filter Ring -- When's the last time you put a polarizer filter on your point-and-shoot digicam? The Contax ships with a ring that allows you to attach 28mm filters. Now I always have a polarizer with me.
  • QuickTime Movies -- You can capture 320 x 240 or 640 x 480 QuickTime movies at 15 or 30 fps. Shoot until the card fills up. You can record audio, too. Very impressive performance.
  • UI that I Can Understand -- The user interface is so easy to use you don't even need the owner's manual. The menus are a joy to read.
  • SD Memory Cards -- I like the versatility of Secure Digital cards. If you have a Palm-powered device such as a Tungsten or Treo, you can pull the SD card out of the Contax and pop it in the PDA for a larger viewing of your pictures. I prefer the Resco Photo Viewer over the bundled Palm photo application. With the Resco app you have a mini photo studio in your PDA that enables basic image editing, slide shows with transitions, and even EXIF data output.
  • In-camera Image Cropping and Resizing -- You can create email-friendly copies of your pictures right in the camera. The Contax enables basic cropping and resizing to 320 x 240 or 160 x 120. Your original image is left untouched. I often resize pictures to 320 x 240 for faster viewing on the Palm. The resampled images are put in a folder named RESIZE so they're easy to find.
  • Voice Memos -- You can add high-quality voice memos up to 30 seconds to accompany your pictures. The Contax saves the audio as 16-bit WAV files. You can listen to the memos via the camera's built-in speaker, using any computer application that plays WAV, such as QuickTime. Or, for big-time fun, insert the SD card into your Palm Powered device (Palm OS 5.0 or later) and listen to the audio using Wave Edit Pro 1.2. I use this software on a Tungsten T2 and like the audio so much that I now consider the Contax a voice recording tool as well as a camera and mini videocam. As a bonus, Wave Edit Pro displays the wave form on the screen and lets you actually edit the audio file and save it back to the card. This is way too much fun.
  • DPOF Printing -- There's a full DPOF print menu that enables you to connect the Contax directly to printers and control the output via the menu on the camera.
  • Mass Storage Device -- No need for special drivers because this camera is also a Mass Storage Device and shows up as a NO NAME drive on both Mac and Windows computers.


The menus are easy to read and navigate.

Quick Side Note -- In my new book, Digital Photography Hacks, I show you how to edit the QuickTime video these cameras produce, manage the audio, and even create rolling titles with just your text editor and a few simple tags -- and that's only a handful of the 100 industrial strength hacks I include. These new pocket digicams have so much capability for you to tap into once you have the knowledge.

Oddities and Shortcomings

The Contax SL300R T* certainly takes its share of risks, and most of them pay off handsomely. But it also has a few quirks. Here are the items that you should be aware of if you're considering giving this camera a spin.

  • Bundled Software -- Adobe Photoshop Album comes bundled with the Contax. If you're a Windows user, this could be an entry in the benefits list because Album is a terrific imaging application. Mac users, however, are essentially left out in the cold.
  • No Panorama Mode -- You'll have to line up your panoramas manually because there's no pano mode on the Contax.
  • No Tripod Socket -- Not that I could tell you where a tripod socket would fit on this diminutive beauty, but there isn't one. You might want to consider getting a photo beanbag from Porter's Camera Store. They only cost about $6 and are versatile camera supports, especially for digicams without tripod sockets.
  • Lightweight Battery Performance -- Better add the cost of a spare battery ($50) onto the price of the camera. In my real-world testing, the BP-780S, 3.7 volt Lithium Ion battery only lasted about half as long as the battery for the Canon S400. And that's not because you have to shoot with the LCD monitor on for the Contax, because I shoot that way with the Canon as well.
  • No A/V Output -- If you want to share your pictures on the big screen, you have to upload to the computer first. There's no A/V output enabling you to show your slide shows directly from the camera to a television monitor.
  • Not Much Macro -- The Zeiss Tessar lens performs very well at normal shooting distances, but the design doesn't allow for getting close to your subjects. Not only do you have to keep the camera about a foot away from the subject, but you're forced to use the wide-angle setting for macro mode. The images are sharp, but certainly this isn't exactly what I'd call close-up photography.

Final Thoughts

The Contax SL300R T* has certainly rekindled my enthusiasm for pocket digicam photography. It is responsive and the images are crisp. I've found myself shooting with it at waist level a lot, which enables me to hold the camera more steady and minimizing camera shake. Movie mode, voice recording, in-camera editing, and compatibility with SD card PDAs put a lot of power in your hand for not many ounces.

As for the specific issue of shutter lag, I'd say this camera has great potential, depending on how you use it. If you pre-focus, it certainly is a speed demon. But the auto-focus system does slow down the effectiveness of RTUNE technology. Rapid firing at over 3 fps is amazing, however, as is full-frame-rate movies.

We may finally be entering an era where shutter lag in pocket digicams is fading in the rearview mirror. The Contax SL300R T* and the other RTUNE models made by Kyocera provide a glimpse into what is possible, and hopefully, what will be commonplace among all digital cameras very soon.

Derrick Story is the author of The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers, The Digital Photography Companion, and Digital Photography Hacks, and coauthor of iPhoto: The Missing Manual, with David Pogue. You can follow him on Twitter or visit www.thedigitalstory.com.

Return to MacDevCenter.com.