How long does the DC260 take to process pictures?
This is a tricky question because the DC260 is the first consumer camera to introduce a digital “buffer”. This lets you take a second picture while the camera is still processing the first picture! You can take the first two pictures back-to-back, with approximately one second in between. But, to take the third picture, you must wait for at least the first one to finish processing. (You don’t have to wait for both.) It might sound complicated, but in practice, you rarely notice what’s going on. If the camera has been unused for a while (45 seconds or more), all processing is complete, and then you can take two back-to-back pictures — a very nice feature! To measure the cycle time, the test pictures were taken with Best Quality, Flash Off, auto-focus, auto-exposure. The lowest quality setting (good) is about one to two seconds faster than the high quality setting, partly because there is less data to write to the CompactFlash picture file.
