Sony DSC-S70 Digital Camera

Speed

After a bit of use, there is no question that the S70 is a slow camera. First, as mentioned before, the extension of the lens at power on 3.5 seconds. A full boot from power on to still image mode take 6 seconds, quite a long time to wait when you have just the right picture.

The camera takes about 1.3 seconds to auto focus and take a picture in the best situation. Under more trying conditions, the auto focus takes what seems to be unreasonably long, taking up to 2.5 seconds to focus and record. The lag on the camera once the shutter is depressed after focus is not bad, running about .1 seconds.

Memory stick reads are writes are also slow, most likely as a result of the S70's lack of a large memory buffer. This is seen when in playback mode, as images seem to crawl to the screen. Often time we ended up passing over the picture we wanted simply because we thought that the S70 was just not responding due to a mistaken button push.

Additional Comments

One thing that the S70 lacks that nearly every other camera in this price range has is a burst mode for taking continuous pictures. Holding down the shutter on the S70 accomplishes no good, as the camera is only able to take one picture at a time. This was most likely done to cut costs, as such a feature requires the embedding of RAM as a temporary storage place. It is too bad that Sony left it out.