Shutter Lag Measurement of Fuji X-H1 and Sony A7RII with StopShot
I have recently bought a Cognisys StopShot High Speed Photography Controller. One of the already available features of StopShot is to make a shutter lag measurement using a light sensor. Basically StopShot triggers the camera, the camera triggers the flash, and the light sensor/beam receiver senses the flash light and the time between the first trigger and the receiver’s light sensing is the shutter lag. Actual value of shutter lag should be lower than this due to delays and I guess shutter has to be activated before the flash is triggered, but still it is quite a good measurement.
I have measured both Fuji X-H1 and Sony A7RII using the same setup. I used a Godox V1 flash at 1/16 power and in manual mode, attached to the hot shoe of both cameras. There is no lens attached, image stabilization (IBIS) is disabled, auto preview is disabled (I realized preview affects the measurements a lot in Sony), they are both recording in RAW compressed format using the same card (Sandisk 300 MB/S), they are both in manual mode and manual flash mode, they are both powered by external AC adapter (Fuji has its own adapter, Sony is using TetherTools Case Relay). X-H1 is also in performance boost mode. Fuji X-H1 has software version 2.01, and Sony A7RII has software version 4.01.
Since high speed photography requires repeatability, I also have purchased Shutter Interface Switch for both cameras. This makes it possible to keep the camera in shutter release half-pressed mode (wake mode in the switch), which typically have a low and stable lag. I made measurements both with a normal shutter release cable and also with the wake mode of shutter interface switch. I made 10 measurements for each setting.
Here are all measurements in milliseconds.
| X-H1 | X-H1 Wake Mode | A7RII | A7RII Wake Mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| 117.9 | 120.8 | 112.5 | 23.6 |
| 115.2 | 123.1 | 102.9 | 20.5 |
| 137.1 | 108.1 | 112.4 | 20.5 |
| 135.7 | 108.0 | 82.5 | 25.0 |
| 137.9 | 103.5 | 82.9 | 20.7 |
| 118.0 | 126.1 | 114.1 | 22.6 |
| 123.1 | 103.4 | 92.8 | 22.3 |
| 143.5 | 113.6 | 102.5 | 23.4 |
| 137.9 | 113.4 | 112.4 | 20.9 |
| 135.7 | 120.5 | 102.9 | 20.8 |
Average of above values:
| X-H1 | X-H1 Wake Mode | A7RII | A7RII Wake Mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| 130.2 | 114.0 | 102.9 | 22.0 |
This shows a few things:
- Fuji X-H1 gets ready pretty quickly, the normal and wake modes are not that different.
- Sony A7RII normal mode is pretty slow comparing to wake mode. This gets even worse if preview (and maybe other settings) are enabled. I did not show that measurements, but I saw above 500ms when preview is enabled.
- I do not know if these cameras has an official shutter lag spec. but Sony seems to be faster than Fuji here in wake mode.
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