High Actuation Numbers on DSLR Shutters

<p>Just curious if anyone has actually seen one fail from over use? Before some miscreant ran off with my NIKON D50. It had around 12K actuation's on it. This was from about 5 years use. This equals 200 shots per month.(or about 7 per day). The bad news for Kodak / Fuji / Ilford and the lab man. Over 300 rolls of film wasn't shot.</p>

<p>So my question is: when DSLR shutters fail. Does something start gradually? Like with film camera shutters? Or does it just go kablooey one day while one is out shooting? I've seen many cloth SLR shutters die on old film cameras.</p>

<p>I just bought a used D50 in an online auction. It has 37K actuation's on it's shutter. This works out to around 600 per month. That's a lot of images. </p>

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<p>I don't know Nikon gear at all, but I'm betting its as durable as Canon equipment. I've had nearly 80k on two different Canons (20D and a 50D) without a hiccup. I've talked with professionals who have more than 100k on similar models.</p>

<p>I have had a shutter fail at 50,000 actuations and I have three bodies now with over 80K actuations. I know people who have gone to 400K and more without a failure. I have had a few failures that required repair that were not related to the shutter.</p>

<p>The deal is that replacing a shutter is not that expensive. Back in 2008 it cost less than $300.00 on a D2Xs. Someone may know the cost these days. </p>

<p>Don't worry about your D50. Replacing the camera would be cheaper than replacing the shutter. Shoot away and enjoy. You will probably have no problem for a long time. </p>

<p>One guy was taking pix of small dogs in action over a weekend, we're talking about 10K per weekend (on DPR). As nutty as this may sound, your 37K actuations are pretty meaningless...don't you think ? Enjoy taking photos...and don't be overly concerned.</p>

<p>Les</p>

<p>Shutters are the same as late film SLRs, so they fail in the same way(s).<br>

When buying 2nd hand, I'd rather take the amount of shutter actuations as a sign of overall use; it's not only the shutter that can fail, any mechanical part will get worse with more use. Very high amounts might be extremely heavy use, so everything might be worn out.... etc.<br>

The number of actuations that manufacterers indicate as MTBF (mean time between failure) - pure statistics. Some shutters will fail after 10 shots, some after 500k... you cannot really predict it. So indeed, enjoy. The D50 remains a really nice camera, except for that peeking hole of a viewfinder ;-)</p>

<p>As Wouter says, you can't predict the failure of a single camera. One can only predict the average. The mean time between failures is even less helpful than an average height. If you know that the average male height in the US is 5 ft 10 inches, you can assume that there will be many people at or near this height and far fewer people at 4 ft 11 in and 6 ft 9 inches. There will be a normal curve that predicts the number of people at each height. With a camera shutter, as with most mechanical devices, the normal curve is replaced by a bathtub curve with very few failures at the average. Most failures occur at very few actuations or very many. If your camera has survived 100 actuations, it is very likely to last far beyond the average number of actuations until failure.</p>