Gut feeling... if manually focused and exposure set manually, the Ricohs and the D-Lux cameras can respond almost instantly. That said, none of them is quite as fast, yet, as a film RF or a DRF. But with a little practice, a lot of photographers seem to be able to get the better SSCs to trip the shutter at the desired moment.
Cheers,
Sean
Sean and Cam,
I would also say "instantly," but not quite as instantly as the M8, whatever that means. It is instantly enough in my experience and certainly nothing like what I think Mitch describes. I would add that I generally use the aperture priority because I find it very facilitating in my work to not think about exposure, unless the light is very consistent and then manual exposure becomes easier. I am finding the aperture priority with matrix very accurate, consistent and fast on this camera. By contrast, the M8 metering requires much more attention and the convenient EC rocker switch of the Ricoh would be doing a lot more to earn its keep on the Leica. (I'm thinking of prying the little switch off the Ricoh and gluing it onto the M8. Do people think that would work?)
My objection to manual exposure with the GRD is the necessity of holding the camera away from the face to see the meter scale, although you could learn to twirl the two wheels with the camera at your face. Ricoh has dropped the selectable wheel rotation direction on the GRD I, which is too bad because the aperture control is now like a Nikon rather than a Leica. If I'm just going to eyeball exposure, which I did for decades with the film M's, then I'm going to have a lot of misexposure because these cameras do not have the latitude of Tri-X.
The manual focusing, of course, is a must for shutter response. As a matter of fact, if the scale indicator is to be believed, the auto focus on this camera appears to be *completely* useless on both my samples of the camera. If "autofocus" on this camera means setting the scale to a hyperfocal position, perhaps something is working, but I don't think so. Fortunately, even wide open, precise focusing is not necessary because of the DOF of this little lens.
The shot below is from the II yesterday, ISO 200 at 5.6 and 1/2000. I would have been better to go to ISO 100. Lens diffraction here was clearly visible during PP.
Walt