The Shutter Count Myth
February 10th, 2011
I just had a buyer whom I sold one of my old D300's on Ebay to hurl mud at me screaming "but the camera has 92k shutter counts!!!! I want my money back!!!".
Holy shit!
It seems every SLR-Buyer is looking for the shutter actuation count in order to judge the state of the camera. The shutter being the only moving part in the camera which is rated by the manufacturer, this would seem to make sense.
Seems to me we're back into the heydays of the Megapixel race. We crave for a hard and fast metric to judge an item.
12 Megapixels!
Or just 5000 actuations!! (much better than 7000 actuations, isn't it?)
Baloney.
Shutter count will not tell you:
- How badly the camera has been knocked about or dropped
- If it is a dud
- If it has been left excessively long in the rain or burning sun
- Has other inherent problems.
Although the manufacturer might be forced to cite a number in the specs, there is no hard and fast rule what it actually means. I think it is meant to convey that "you should not be concerned if your shutter conks out after this number of shots". Or, "you should not be concerned if your shutter conks out
before this number of shots".
A camera will NOT DIE the moment it reaches the rated count! (as
some lady seems to believe). It is not a printer cartridge which will disable the printer as soon as the print count has been reached. In fact a rather
unscientific site - but the only one I found - seems to suggest that there is not much of a correlation between shutter counts and shutter lifetime. The shutter might die at 10k, 100k or sometimes 1million or more actuations.
The actuation count on my main camera is WAY beyond the manufacturer's specs, but the camera works as good as new.
Replace the shutter when it dies - it isn't that expensive (the actuation count will also be reset to 0).
So: Enjoy shooting and stop worrying about the number. It is essentially irrelevant.
