An experiment to see whether using MLU reduces the shutter lag - the only difference between the two shots is that with the one on the right, MLU was used...

I'd say it's pretty conclusive.

Whether it reduces it enough to use the beam detector to photograph moving insects (for example) remains to be seen.

This is the first test of my second-generation beam detector/delay trigger circuit, which is microcontroller-based and allows me to set a delay before triggering in 100 microsecond increments up to a second or more. The delay in this case was set to 0.