# shutter cycles



## pakosouthpark (Jun 2, 2012)

trying to understand a bit of the technology here - Why these have a life expectancy? 
I mean 150 000 shots is not thaaaaat much.. i know that it can go beyond that number but also it can happen to never reach those numbers. does canon replace the shutter after it dies? did film SLRs had this life expectancy as well?


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## Synomis192 (Jun 2, 2012)

Think of a camera shutter like a door.

Doors open and close, just like a shutter when it lets in light. Eventually the hinges that the doors are on will either break or become loose due to use or abuse.

Shutters that go past the shutter-expectancy do last for a quite a while after said expectancy but all shutters will fail after prolonged use.

Canon does replace the shutter but it does cost quite a lot (I think it cost about $150-$200). 

150,000 shots is actually quite a lot. If I'm not mistaken you have a 7d because of that high shutter count.

I've had my T1i for about 3 years. I've shot for many different scenarios from low-light choir shows, to sideline danger zones for high school football games. The shutter life on a T1i is roughly 50,000 but my shutter count is only 29,765. (Magic Lantern said so...) 

I wouldn't be worried at all. 150,000 is a very long life expectancy for your shutter. You are a lucky one haha.

Film SLRs do have a shutter life as well but I don't know how long they lasted or how to replace a shutter, even do I am an owner of a film SLR camera


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Jun 2, 2012)

It was never a issue in film days, 150,000 shots would bankrupt you with developing and printing costs, shooting 100 images for a wedding was a lot. Photographers were careful to get just the right poses.

Now, it costs nothing to take 500 or 1000 shots, my wife and I have taken 2500 of some events. This means that for busy photographers who take 2000 or more a week, that adds up to 100,000 a year, often more. 

For enthusiasts, 2500 shots a year is often a figure I've seen, but even 10,000 a year is a lot for a non professional. If you are using a camera so heavily, lots of things will wear out besides the shutter, its a very low cost per exposure. If a 1000 dollar camera is used for 150,000 images, it costs 3/4 cents a shot, and even then, the camera will have some used value.


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## Marsu42 (Jun 11, 2012)

pakosouthpark said:


> I mean 150 000 shots is not thaaaaat much..



It isn't if you do dicy macro shots, focus stacking, exposure bracketing or high fps shots a lot to get the moment. I'm now @80k of my 100k 60d cycles, and hope it will go way beyond that. I have failed to get some statistics about how long the shutter really works on xxd and xxxd models, so if anyone can give a prediction, I'd be obliged.


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## wickidwombat (Jun 11, 2012)

i've heard of quite a few 40Ds with over 300k on the clock on original shutter


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## gmrza (Jun 11, 2012)

Marsu42 said:


> pakosouthpark said:
> 
> 
> > I mean 150 000 shots is not thaaaaat much..
> ...



oh, and beware when buying a used body from a time-lapser ;D


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## pwp (Jun 11, 2012)

When I retired my 5D classic it had close to 300,000 on the clock and still worked like new. A 20D had similar high mileage. There are plenty of 1-Series out there in the hands of sports shooters with over a million actuations. My 1-Series bodies are nowhere near those numbers but they'd be way past Canon's advertised life cycle. 

The shutter count from Canon is very conservative. Some shutters will collapse before the spec time and others will exceed it 10 fold. It's like any mass produced mechanical item. Some die young, some seem to live forever.

PW


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## neuroanatomist (Jun 11, 2012)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> For enthusiasts, 2500 shots a year is often a figure I've seen, but even 10,000 a year is a lot for a non professional.



I shoot over 10K shots per year. The only things that keep my shutter counts down are that I have two bodies, and the relatively slow frame rate of the 5DII. At 12 fps, I'm glad the 1D X has a 400K rating!


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## viggen61 (Jun 11, 2012)

> Canon does replace the shutter but it does cost quite a lot (I think it cost about $150-$200).



That's all? Consideing that - when the time comes - replacing my 7D will likely cost more than $2,500, a few hundred for a replacement shutter isn't all that bad!

I'm just a dedicated amateur, but my 18-month-new 7D is rapidly closing in on 20k shutter activations. If I could get the birds to sit still, though... ;D


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## Marsu42 (Jun 11, 2012)

viggen61 said:


> That's all? Consideing that - when the time comes - replacing my 7D will likely cost more than $2,500, a few hundred for a replacement shutter isn't all that bad!



It's different with less expensive bodies like my 60d - the price of a new body is about €800 and going down, esp. when the 70d will be out. For picking up a screwdriver, Canon service in Germany seems to charge about €200, and with a new shutter the replacement the resulting cost might be as much as 50% of a brand new camera with warranty... correct me if I'm wrong and replacing a shutter is much less expensive than a lens repair job.


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## pakosouthpark (Jun 11, 2012)

well i dont have a camera at all at the moment, but trying to get a 2nd hand 5d II so have to pay attention to the shutter cycles number. Also i want to do a lot of time lapses so this number at 150k shots is not that big for me! might look into a brand new 5d ii..


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## Astro (Jun 11, 2012)

shoot timelaps and 150000 is not a huge number.


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## agierke (Jun 11, 2012)

i just had my shutter explode on my 5Dc last fall. canon replaced it and cleaned the whole camera for $200.00. well worth the price!

final shutter count was 186,000 on a 150k rated shutter.


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## pakosouthpark (Jun 11, 2012)

Astro said:


> shoot timelaps and 150000 is not a huge number.



+1 it goes really fast..


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## helpful (Jun 11, 2012)

I am really confused by this thread. Are you all trying to tease each other or what?

Someone said 10K a year was a lot. Someone else mentioned 2,500.

Both of those are way under what I shoot per month, and I just do photography as a "full time" job after my regular full time real job. My total for the year so far is 428,374. Over 50% of them are keepers, i.e., used and/or delivered.

I hope that you are kidding.

Or maybe I am just doing too much for my clients. Would they really be happy with 100 photos from a wedding?

Update: for comparison, my numbers were 4,000+ photos per year using film, and I went half digital / half film between 2003-2006 and then I went all digital.


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## neuroanatomist (Jun 11, 2012)

helpful said:


> Would they really be happy with 100 photos from a wedding?



I wouldn't. We got way more than that, and the photogs were shooting Mamiya 645s (the film ones...and I've got the stack of negatives to prove it...).


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## helpful (Jun 11, 2012)

neuroanatomist said:


> helpful said:
> 
> 
> > Would they really be happy with 100 photos from a wedding?
> ...



Good, I didn't think so, either.


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## smellme (Jun 11, 2012)

wickidwombat said:


> i've heard of quite a few 40Ds with over 300k on the clock on original shutter



In my 40D I change the shutter first at 200K and second time at 300K. In 7D I'm on 400K still with the original shutter. Also in 1D mark IV I'm on the original shutter, but I only did 100K with it.


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## Kernuak (Jun 11, 2012)

helpful said:


> I am really confused by this thread. Are you all trying to tease each other or what?
> 
> Someone said 10K a year was a lot. Someone else mentioned 2,500.
> 
> ...


It depends on what you're shooting. Obviously if you're shooting weddings, even at only one a month, then a several hundred per month isn't unexpected. Shoot landscapes though with the same model and it could be much lower. I also have two bodies, shooting wildlife with the 7D and landscapes with the 5D MkII, even though I haven't been out as much this year, due to pressures at work, my combined shutter count is probably in the 15-30k mark over the past 3 years, although it's difficult to be sure on the 7D (one week in Scotland I must have been close to 5k in just that week), as there is no easy way of checking, other than trying to work out how many times it's been around the clock.


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## briansquibb (Jun 11, 2012)

I reckon on about 1k for a wedding

At the moment I am shooting some 2k per week on average


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## pwp (Jun 11, 2012)

neuroanatomist said:


> helpful said:
> 
> 
> > Would they really be happy with 100 photos from a wedding?
> ...



Back in the film days I shot maybe a dozen weddings a year...mostly for corporate clients. Shot on EOS 1n bodies, they always seemed to average around 15 rolls of 36 exposure neg film. That equals 540 mostly thoughtfully composed shots. 20 rolls was HUGE. A massive 720 frames! OMG.. And it was tough to edit.

My weddings PA has probably dropped to more like five or six a year, still mostly for corporate clients, and the thought of being restricted to 540 shots scares me. These days weddings seem to run to around 3000. After a brutal edit, the client gets around 250 shots. Comparing the wedding images now with ten years ago, the freedom to shoot completely unrestricted is delivering brides great shots that leave the old 15 roll wedding deliveries gasping for respectability. 

So in the context of this thread, full time wedding shooters would hit the shutter life cycle sooner than most. But a 100 photo wedding? Maybe this was the number of images delivered to the couple rather than the number of frames the photographer shot on the day.


PW


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## DB (Jun 11, 2012)

pakosouthpark said:


> trying to understand a bit of the technology here - Why these have a life expectancy?
> I mean 150 000 shots is not thaaaaat much.. i know that it can go beyond that number but also it can happen to never reach those numbers. does canon replace the shutter after it dies? did film SLRs had this life expectancy as well?



All machines that have 'moving parts' will eventually fail or break. The technical jargon is MTBF or Mean Time Between Failures. Take your home PC, the most vulnerable component is your disk drive because it has a drive head that moves across a spindle of discs (memory, processors etc. are just based upon an electric charge passing through a silicon wafer - there are no moving parts in RAM or Intel CPUs). In the 1980s and 1990s, most disk drive manuacturers e.g. Seagate, Samsung, Motorola etc. would quote speed, size, cache and mtbf (used to be about 2,000 hours of actual use - how often is your drive in physical use?). Nowadays, tech has moved on quite a bit, hence the move to SSD (Solid State Drives essentially flash memory) similar to CF or SD memory cards. Your camera memory card has no moving parts, so in theory, could last forever.

Automobiles have lots of moving parts, which is why most last about a decade or so. Cameras have fewer and fewer moving parts, but the shutter actuation is the largest (and most important) one, which is why Canon et al hedge themselves by quoting probably quite conservative actuation lifespans -> it is the weakest link in the body of a camera (thing most likely to break with high usage), but obviously they're designed to be replaced for a couple of hundred bucks.


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## tron (Jun 12, 2012)

agierke said:


> i just had my shutter explode on my 5Dc last fall. canon replaced it and cleaned the whole camera for $200.00. well worth the price!
> 
> final shutter count was 186,000 on a 150k rated shutter.



The 5Dc has a 100k rated shutter not 150k. But this shows how good the shutter is (since it lasted 86% more).


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## briansquibb (Jun 12, 2012)

BozillaNZ said:


> SSD and flash memory has limited life span called erase-write cycle. And the funny thing is, as silicon process advances (50nm > 30nm > 20nm > 10nm > 5nm?), the erase-write cycle shortens. To give you a concept of this cycle, the high end SLC 50nm flash memory cell has erase-write cycle of 100,000. The latest consumer MLC 20nm flash memory cell has erase-write cycle of 1000(!). Yes, 1000 am I'm not kidding.
> 
> Hence flash memory is a weirdo child that goes backwards in terms of reliability.



Just had my 3 year old SSD fail on me


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## akiskev (Jun 12, 2012)

After ~60k shots on my XTi, I'm starting to get some random "Error 99" codes. It must be shutter or mirror because I hear a weird mechanical sound when error 99 occurs.. If I turn the camera off and then on, it's good as new! But for how long....?


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## Marine03 (Jun 12, 2012)

What is the shutter life of a 450D? Mine is several years old and I have close to 30K. 

Just did my second wedding with it, and depending on how much I was paying as a customer if I got 100 photos from my wedding that sounds perfect to me. Tell me other than feeling like you got your money's worth because you get a disk with 1000 pics on it, whats the point? In my house we have 5 photo's from our wedding printed out. For someone without an eye for photography its beyond necessary.


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