Motor drive (photography)

[2] Motor drives for compact and amateur cameras wind slowly—shot-to-shot intervals of approximately a second are commonplace.

Later special Canon models used similar mechanisms to achieve such speeds, while cameras with moving mirrors reached approximately five frames per second by the 1980s.

Today, the fastest professional models from Canon and Nikon achieve approximately ten frames per second with a moving mirror.

Many camera models refer to different shooting modes—single shot, burst, continuous, self timer—as drive modes, thus keeping alive the terminology of film.

An external battery grip is occasionally referred to as a motor drive as it tends to increase the frame rate.