How can I increase my digital cameras shutter speed?

Question

What setting whould I adjust to do that? I know my camera can only take pictures so fast, but right now I know its going a lot slower than it should be, the lagtime is terrible.

Answer 1

shutter speed and lag time are two different things, to adjust shutter speed use "shutter priority", to avoid lag use prefocus as per the Dr above, or you could be "pro" and use manual focus

a

Answer 2

If you pre-focus by pressing the shutter button half-way down while aiming at your subject - or where you anticipate your subject will be when you want to take the picture - it will help considerably. You can set your camera in "Sport" mode or "Scenery" and this will minimize the lag. If you do not use the flash, it will help. If you turn off "face detection," it will help. If you turn off the LCD monitor and use the viewfinder only, it will help. If you use the continuous shooting mode for a burst of 4 or 5 shots, there will be no pre-focus in between those shots. For most point and shoot cameras, this will give you 1.5-to-2 frames per second, but you can't use flash.

Some point and shoot cameras are better than others. I have a Canon Powershot SD900 that seems quite fast to me. If you go to http://www.dpreview.com and read the reviews (once they are available for the cameras you are considering), you can go to the page called "Performance" and see exactly what the tested shutter lag is, as well as several other performace benchmarks.

Here's a link showing a chart of various cameras and their shutter lag as well as the time it takes to shoot five frames. You will not see any DSLR's listed, because they have no shutter lag. If you click on the column heading, such as "One Shot," the chart will sort according to that measurement.
http://www.cameras.co.uk/html/shutter-lag-comparisons.cfm

Here's a list of five good cameras with brief shot-to-shot delays of less than 1.5 seconds (in good light) each: http://www.cnet.com.au/digitalcameras/cameras/0,239036184,339271492,00.htm
Canon Powershots SD850-IS and SD750, Sony Cybershots DSC-T100 and DSC-W55, Kodak Easyshare C875.

Answer 3

You refer to 'lagtime'. Do you mean the time between you pressing the shutter and the shutter opening? If so, there is nothing you can do to alter it (except, perhaps, install new batteries). If you want to alter the shutter speed, however, from, say 1/125 to 1/250, you will have to look in the manual. You don't tell us what make and model your camera is, so I can be no more helpful than that.

Answer 4

Before I can answer your question, I must estimate the resolving power of the digital imaging system inside your digital camera, and the size of the camera’s pixel sensor array.