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Heard a young tech say 'shutter count is everything' and it got me thinking

I was at a camera swap meet in Portland last Saturday and overheard a kid telling his friend that a camera with 50,000 clicks is basically 'done.' Made me feel old. I remember fixing a Nikon F2 that had no counter at all, you just shot until the film ran out and it was fine. Shutter count matters but it's not the whole story. A camera with 10,000 hard, dirty actuations can be worse than one with 100,000 that was stored in a dry cabinet. Anyone else think we put too much stock in that number?

2 comments

2 Comments

wright.kevin1mo ago

Start by saying the kid probably bought into marketing hype. I've seen shutters fail at 10,000 clicks and others hit 500,000 without a hiccup. The real killer is how the camera was treated, not some arbitrary number in the menu. A camera bounced around in a dusty bag or left in a hot car will die way before one with a high count but lived in a climate controlled studio. Cameras are tools, not odometers, and obsessing over this one stat feels like missing the bigger picture about actual condition and care.

janab821mo ago

Oh great, so now my camera has better resale value than my car!