Canon PowerShot S60: Follow-up to the S50

The Timing Tests

* NOTE: For all of our time tests, the camera was reset to its factory default settings and set to record using the highest resolution and quality JPG setting. A SanDisk Ultra II 512 MB CF card was used.

Startup Time

The startup time on the S60 was just about average at almost 4 seconds. We found no difference in speed when we disabled the startup image. The startup time will vary slightly based on the flash card used.

Shutter Lag

To record shutter lag, we perform two tests. For the first test, we pre-focus the lens and measure the amount of time it takes the camera to take a picture after the shutter button is pressed. The second test measures the time it takes for the camera to take a picture after we press the shutter button without pre-focusing. Each test is performed 3 times and the results are averaged. For more information regarding our testing procedures, please refer to our Testing Procedures page.

The lag times were very good overall. A pre-focus lag time of .08 sec. is so small that it is hardly noticeable when shooting and the focus-lag time of .69 sec. fairs pretty well compared to other current digicams. The Nikon Coolpix 5200, for example, had a pretty average time of .82 sec.

Write Times

We recorded 5 different write times with a SanDisk Ultra II 512 MB CF card: Single Shot, Shot to Shot, Shot to Shot w/Flash, and Shot to Shot w/Buffer Full.

Single Shot – The time it takes for a single picture to be completely written to the flash card
Shot To Shot (STS) – The time until the second shot is able to be taken after the first
Shot To Shot w/Flash – The time it takes for the camera to take two pictures with the flash starting from the moment the first flash is fired to the moment the second is fired
Shot To Shot w/Buffer Full – The time between shots when the buffer is full

We set the camera to the highest resolution and quality JPG setting. We performed each test three times in Auto mode and averaged the results. Below are the resolution, quality setting, and average file size used for the tests.

 JPG, 2592x1944, SuperFine, Avg. file size = 2.05MB

Although we were not blown away by the S60’s Single Shot time of 2.73 sec., the Shot To Shot time was very fast at 1.87 sec. Shot To Shot w/Flash showed a slightly below-average performance of 5.54 sec. After we filled the buffer with 8 images, the shooting slowed to 3.67 sec between shots.

We should also note that in our tests we were able to shoot 6 images at 1.97 fps in Standard Continuous Shooting mode. The time between the 6th shot and the 7th shot was 1.67 sec. After the 7th frame, continuous shooting slowed to 2.97 sec. between shots. In High Speed Continuous Shooting mode, we were able to shoot 8 images at 2.19 fps. It was 1.97 sec. between the 8th and 9th frame. After the 9th frame, shooting slowed to 2.40 seconds between shots.