WHICH DIGITAL CAMERA DO YOU RECOMMEND ME FOR TAKING PHOTOFINISH OF HORSE RACING ?

-- LUIS ALBERTO ONTIVEROS VARGAS (aplicado@yahoo.com), January 04, 1999

Answers

Your application could be very tricky, trying to get the exact timing of the horses crossing the finish line. We've begun measuring shutter- lag timing (the delay between pressing the shutter and taking a picture) on cameras, so some of the more recent reviews will have this information. (You obviously want a very short lag time.) With all cameras, you'll get a much faster response if you let the camera prefocus before tripping the shutter. This is usually done by half- pressing the shutter button before the shot, holding it down until you're ready to shoot, then pressing the rest of the way. You can get down to about 0.1-0.2 seconds delay on many cameras doing this, and by anticipating the moment the horses cross the line, could get a pretty good shot.

Some cameras have "motor drive" or "sequence" modes, in which they grab frames pretty fast, up to some reasonable number of shots. The new Olympus D-620L we're just now testing will do this, grabbing up to 5 frames at full resolution, at about 3 frames per second. Other cameras (several Casio models, including the recently-reviewed QV- 7000SX) can capture "mini-movies" lasting several seconds, at up to 10 frames per second. The drawback with these though, is that the resolution is very low (160x120), and so may not show enough to clearly reveal which horse is in front of which.

I don't know if this helped, or just muddied the waters, but hopefully some of it was useful...

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), January 08, 1999.