For several years, only two commercial digital cameras could take time lapse. These were the Kodak DC220, 260 and 290 series (now discontinued), and the Epson 3100Z (also discontinued). The Kodak cameras had a shortest interval of 1 min, which was not short enough for some things, and the controls for setting up the time lapse were unwieldy. The Epson had a shortest interval of 5 sec, which is must better, and the time lapse controls are very easy to set up. Most of the time lapse movies here were taken with either of these two cameras. The image sequence from a time lapse was downloaded onto a Macintosh computer. The program Quick Time, Pro version, was used to make the image sequence into a movie. The pro version costed ~$30 to upgrade the free version.

Recently (2007), time lapse has begun to reappear on cameras, but in my opinion, none are quite as easy as the Epson. Recent Pentax WP optio and Ricoh Caplio R7 models have it, with a minimal time interval of 10 sec. The number of images must be specified, using a button which increases the number by one every time you press it (very inconvenient). It would be better to be able to tell the camera to take pictures until there is no more room on the camera card.