Charlie Howard (Steve's Digicam, Panasonic forum, 9 February 2004)...
If you half-press the shutter button and wait until you get a solid green light, the shutter lag when you press the button the rest of the way is 0.15 seconds. If the camera is in Auto-focus and you just press the shutter button without half-pressing it first, the shutter lag can be between 0.7 seconds and several seconds, depending on how long it takes to get focus lock. If the camera is in Manual Focus and you just press the shutter button without half-pressing it first, the shutter lag is about 0.35 seconds. If you're in Manual Focus and have turned off the Review feature, the delay time AFTER taking a picture is about one second.
I've taken 8-9 separate frames in ten seconds just to test the camera. That didn't give me time to compose the scene, so the pictures were artistically terrible, but the camera easily kept up, and can keep going at that rate until you fill the card. Other than true `Pro' cameras, this is by far the fastest digicam around.
If you have a fast SD card (Panasonic 256MB, SanDisk Ultra II, etc.), the delay after a 5-frame high-speed burst is 2.2 seconds. The burst itself takes 1.25 seconds, so you can start a new burst of 5 frames every 3.5 seconds, and keep doing so until the card fills. (With a standard speed card, that post-burst delay can be 12 seconds, so it pays to get a high-speed card.)
{Picture below `Fog lifting over Spring Lake' by Charlie Howard with FZ10}
