High Mileage D300s

I bought this cheap with a lot of cameras. It was sold as untested, but most of the others worked and I figured it would also(I have a few other D300ss from the same lot).

 

My plan in addition to upgrading my D300 for the times I need a DX camera was also to put together some D300/D300s starter kits to give away to some budding photographers I know.

 

After seeing the shutter count on this one, I'm inclined to keep using it until it dies.

 

Wow, that's like me shooting 11,762 36-exposure rolls of film. Why on earth would anyone have to shoot so much?

Wow, that's like me shooting 11,762 36-exposure rolls of film. Why on earth would anyone have to shoot so much?

 

The D300s was introduced in 2009. If the camera was purchased then, it's the equivalent of a little over 1,500 rolls per year, or 125 rolls a month. Besides, it's not film, it's digital. Sometimes it's the right thing to shoot a lot. I'm glad Ben's camera could do it.

Hey, it could be worse... shoots several frames per second if you want it to

Hey, it could be worse... shoots several frames per second if you want it to

 

Out of the box, the 300s can do 7fps, and with an EN-EL4 in an MB-D10 it will do 8fps.

 

I think I also recall that the the buffer depth on the D300 at Jpeg med. is 100 frames, which probably realistically means that with a reasonably fast card you can lock the shutter and it will keep going until you either fill the card or run the battery down. A pair of 32gb cards(not exactly exotic) should hold several thousand frames of medium Jpeg, which means that you'll run the battery down first. With an EN-EL3 in the camera and an EN-EL4 in a battery grip, Nikon says around 1500 shots. That's about 4 minutes of shooting. If you have batteries on hand, you can rack up a lot of frames pretty fast.

 

Granted I have NO reason to shoot that fast or that much, but it could be done.

n lock the shutter and it will keep going until you either fill the card or run the battery down.

Or fry the sensor, which will probably happen before the battery is empty - especially when shooting at 7fps.

Or fry the sensor, which will probably happen before the battery is empty - especially when shooting at 7fps.

 

Fair enough...like I said I will probably use it until it dies, but not likely that way.

If it was used to shoot sports extensively, that would explain it.

I've shot up to 700 frames at a single high school varsity football game (with digital). So shooting a season of just 10 games and you are at 7,000 shots.

Add in JV football, then volleyball (JV + var), basketball (JV+ var), baseball (JV + var), tennis, and all the other sports, and I can see the count at over 70,000 in a year.

 

Pro baseball or football, and I can see 1,000+ shots per game.

Edited December 3, 2017 by Gary Naka

Um. For what it's worth, I've shot over 3000 at a wedding (even as a guest). Trying to capture the dancing does a good job of eating exposures. :-)

Great! Please, keep us updated on how long it will keep shooting.

 

Considering that today's cameras are so good that we really do not need to replace them just because a replacement comes along, we may be going back to the 1970s when the cameras where too good (durable) for the manufacturers own good.

Baseball season is over for my nephews, so I won't be going to any more of those games this year. Basketball is a bit more of a challenge in places like church gyms where the lighting often is the greatest, and my D800 may come out for those for better low ISO.

 

I've been using my D300 for baseball since with an MB-D10 and EN-EL4 it seems to AF almost as fast as my D2X and manages 8fps without the stupid 2x crop mode. I'd use my D2H if it weren't for the fact that I think photos from it are just plain ugly. I feel like the only thing MAYBE holding back AF speed is that the AF motor in the D2X seems to handle my 80-200 2.8D a bit better.

 

In any case, I can certainly rack up some frames on the D300s in the right situation. All considered, my investment in this camera now I think is around $75 so it won't be the end of the world if it dies the first time I take it, even though I actually kind of doubt that happens. My local shop had a glut of used MB-D10s(Nikon branded) that they started clearing out at $20 each, and I finally bought all of them when they got down to $5. Of course, that's also not a part that's married to the camera. One of them had the EN-EL4 cap, while the rest all had EN-EL3 trays(and a few even had EN-EL3s in them).

Here's another from the same lot.

 

Apparently these saw newspaper service.

 

The shutter counts on the two cameras had to come from extensive use of burst mode at high frame rates for quite a few years, and the shutters are still alive. Given the mechanical wear and tear that the mirror mechanism undergoes, plus the heat buildup in the sensor that Dieter pointed out, one has to tip the hat to Nikon for building a truly robust digital SLR.

Agreed they've done well. I've sometimes been curious that people have stated the lower-end cameras (such as the D7000) might not be designed to run continuous bursts in the same way even if they had similar shutter ratings - from the point of robustness, not just the buffer limits. I've never really understood the argument unless something's actually heating up during use: it's not like the camera gets tired and needs a rest, surely? (Slightly off-topic, I realise.)

 

When the thread started I did a little maths and wondered about time lapse uses. It came to just over three hours of time lapse recording, I believe. Allowing for editing, I imagine there are some film places (or wildlife documentary studios) which would get through this kind of frame count without too much trouble. Chicken Run or Corpse Bride will have been an awful lot of shutter activations in total. (Not quite this many, but allow for some editing and a couple of projects and you'd get there.) Journalism is a bit more common, though!