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In virtually every digital camera there is a delay between the instant when you press the shutter and the instant when the camera takes the picture. This is called shutter lag.
 
 
 

Conclusions

• To minimise the shutter lag keep the shutter half pressed before taking a picture.
• Without flash the minimum shutter lag is 240 milliseconds.
• With flash the minimum shutter lag is 570 milliseconds.

The test

• In this test I measured the shutter lag of the 4040 by using a WAW-file (sound) editor.I used Goldwave and opened a sound file with a length of 1 second. This is the screen I got (resized to 50%):

• When you press the red record button a white vertical line starts running from left to right. If you press the shutter when the line crosses let's say the 0.4 seconds point you can see in the resulting image where the line was when the camera effectively took the picture and from that calculate the shutter lag.
• I did two measurements: one without flash and one with flash.

Shutter delay without flash

• In this test the shutter was half-pressed to minimise shutter lag. I set the camera to an exposure time of 1/100 s. This is the resulting image:

• Since each vertical subdivision is 50 milliseconds, the camera delay is approximately 240 milliseconds when the flash is not used and the shutter-button is half-pressed.

Shutter delay with flash

• With flash the whole looks like this (just a screen capture - not a camera photo - the green vertical lines indicate when pre-flash and flash happened. For more information about the procedure see the preflash page in the 4040 online resource):

Here I press the shutter at the 0.3 seconds point, the pre-flash comes at 0.75 seconds and the main flash comes at 0.87 seconds (pre-flash and main flash are explained in greater detail in the pre-flash page in the Olympus 4040 resource). The total shutter delay with flash is therefore 570 milliseconds. This is the minimum shutter delay with flash - you'll have to keep the shutter half-pressed to achieve this.
 

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