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M9 with 100,000-plus clicks


glacierparkmagazine

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Generally they talk about shutter actuations in "Mean Time Between Failures" or MTBF.    Last time I had any info about that, most "consumer" cameras were good for 50k clicks, and "pro" cameras from 150k to 300k depending on the brand (the Canon EOS1Ds Mk III is rated at 300k, and the Nikon D4 is rated at 400k.)  As that's the mean time between failures there will be outliers on both ends of the spectrum....  may your M9 be one to go to 300k!  :) 

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My canon 1 series were rated at 200k. The 1Ds2 crashed at 30k while the 1D2 is still going strong at over 100k. It's all luck of the draw. 

I agree whole heartedly with luck of the draw.

 

I have a very old Pentax *ist DL2 (certainly never intended as a professional camera) that is still working well at over 110,000 shutter actuations. I have no idea when it will die but it still gets used all the time since it is my E-Bay product sales camera. You just never know.

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I'm curious why shutter count was never an issue with film cameras. It's only since digital, because most cameras allow you to check, that people have become obsessed/worried about shutter count!

 

My R3 shutter is playing up - not dead - but I've had the camera for 30 years and have no idea how many photos I've taken with it!

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I'm curious why shutter count was never an issue with film cameras. It's only since digital, because most cameras allow you to check, that people have become obsessed/worried about shutter count!

 

 

I would have thought that it is fairly obvious that the shutter sees far more action in a digital camera than in a comparable film camera. 150,000 clicks is over 4000 rolls of film. Amateurs who might have eked out a roll for as long as possible think nothing of filling a 32GB card in a couple of days nowadays. 

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I'm curious why shutter count was never an issue with film cameras.

Many years ago I was told that Leica once tested an M3 shutter to destruction, but gave up at 1 million actuations. Whether true or not I am unsure, and I can't remember who told me (I think it was at R G Lewis many years ago) but it was certainly a simple and easily repairable shutter and perhaps reliability was to do with its purely mechanical construction?

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1. Congrats to GPM! I expect to make it - eventually.

 

2. As to why we care about this:

 

Yes, the fact that it is "there" now. The Fuji monster-Leica MF film cameras had an exposed-roll counter on the bottom, and perhaps there were a few others. But it is mostly dependent on having a firmware-based camera that can track and make the info available.

 

However -

 

Film camera shutters, especially of a certain age (horizontal-travelling curtains) tended to fail slowly. They might work overall for 1,000,000 exposures - but for the last 990,000, the top shutter speed may have dropped from 1/1000th to 1/700th or lower, unless "serviced" along the way. Copal/Seiko-style blade shutters tend to fail all at once - I had a Nikon N8008s shutter implode and spray bits of blade throughout the film chamber, 20 years ago.

 

The old curtain shutters were "maintainable" - i.e. someone got under the hood and tweaked and greased it, and maybe replaced the curtains eventually,  and it was back to original performance. So the total usage for a given shutter just kept going up and up. Blade shutters are modular and disposable and simply replaced completely when they fail, rather than "serviced." One probably could service a blade shutter if it failed (take it apart and rebuild it with some new parts) and give it a more-or-less infinite life. But it would cost far more than simply undoing 4-6 screws (and maybe a flex cable), removing it, tossing it and installing a new one.

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