Timings & File Sizes

Overall the S404 was a quick camera. As with most extending lens cameras the S404's slowest action is power on or off. The S404's focus and lag speeds are all very respectable and it's shot to shot time is very impressive once you get used to waiting for the AF bracket to re-appear BEFORE pressing the shutter release (otherwise the camera "locks"). A good buffer implementation means that you can get back to shooting while in the background your last image is still being written to the CF card.

Timing Notes: All times calculated as an average of three operations. A Viking 256 MB Compact Flash card was used for timings. Unless otherwise stated all timings were made on a 2272 x 1704 FINE JPEG image (approx. 1.6 MB per image).

Action	Details	Time taken (seconds)	Notes
Power: Off to Record	Lens always defaults to wide	5.1	Lens takes 1.2 secs *1
Power: Off to Play		4.8	Image is displayed
Power: Record to Off	Lens at wide angle	4.1	Lens retract *2
Power: Play to Off	Lens at wide angle	4.2	Lens retract *2
Mode: Record to Play		1.6	Image is displayed
Mode: Play to Record		1.6
Play: Magnify	To x2.0	3.1	*3
Play: Browse delay	Delay between images	~ 0	Virtually zero
Rec: Thumbnail view	3 x 3 thumbnails	0.7
Auto Focus LAG	Wide focus mode	0.9 - 1.7	Average - Fast *4
Auto Focus LAG	Selected AF area mode	0.8 - 1.7	Fast *4
Shutter Release LAG		0.1	Fast
Total LAG		1.0 - 2.0	Average
Off to Shot Taken		5.8	Average to Fast
Shot to Shot	2272 x 1704 JPEG FINE	1.8	Very Fast *5

Continuous drive mode

The table below shows the results of our continuous shooting test, indicating the actual frame rate along with maximum number of frames at a selection of image resolution / quality settings and how long you would have to wait after taking the maximum number of frames before you could take the next shot. A Viking 256 MB Compact Flash card was used for this test.

The S404 has probably one of the best buffer use implementations I've seen on any consumer digital camera, once an image has been pushed into the camera's buffer (as soon as the shot is taken) the camera begins writing to the CF card. The write process does not hinder the operation of the camera in any way. In continuous shooting mode the camera will shoot as long as there is space in the buffer, with a good CF card and small enough image file sizes (1280 x 960 STANDARD or lower) you can shoot continuously until the CF card is full. Overall although the continuous shooting speed isn't particularly fast the availability and size of the cameras buffer means that you can shoot in continuous mode almost without restrictions.

Interesting that the same observation made of the S304 is true on the S404, that for smaller image sizes the actual shooting speed (fps) is slower for smaller files (probably because smaller files have to be "downsampled" from the 2272 x 1704 image).

File Flush / Display Timing

Timings shown below are the time taken for the camera to process and "flush" the image out to the Compact Flash card, the timer was started as soon as the shutter release was pressed (shutter click was heard) and stopped when activity indicator LED beside the storage compartment went out. This means the timings also include the cameras processing time and as such are more representative of the actual time to "complete the task". A Viking 256 MB Compact Flash card was used for this test.

Battery life

We ran the camera through our new battery life test. This test is designed to be fair and comparative to each camera and battery type:

• Take 4 shots without flash
• Wait 2 minutes (50% of the time powering the camera off)
• Take 1 shot with flash
• Wait 1 minute
• Repeat

All batteries had been fully discharged and recharged before the test and all cameras were reset to their factory default settings. Here are the results:

The S404 did noticably better than its older version the S304, perhaps Minolta have tweaked the firmware or other internal components to improve battery life. Overall the camera showed a respectable two and a half hours on a fairly standard set of 1600 mAh NiMH AA batteries.