Durability of SL2.. anybody like me?

[BernardC]

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53 minutes ago, Eclectic Man said:

Well, cars in the past were built to last better. Remember that decades ago, Henry Ford sent engineers around the USA to find abandoned Model T's and examine them to find out why they had been ditched. Everything bar the crankshaft was found to have failed.  So Henry told the engineers to make the crankshafts out of thinner metal.  I recently scrapped my 1999 Ford Focus, and the scrapper said no new car would mechanically survive for 20 years of driving as the engines were not made as robustly now.

The opposite might be true. When I was a kid, my dad used to trade-in the family car after 100,000 miles (162,000 km). At that point there was nothing left that worked as intended: the body was rusted, the engine was losing oil from every direction, the transmission needed a very expensive rebuild, the interior was worn-out, etc. Modern cars feel like new at that mileage.

That's a clear case of "survivorship bias:" we see perfectly-preserved cars at shows, or on the internet, and think that they must have some inherent quality that newer cars do not posses. What we don't see is the other 99.9999% that were scrapped and recycled.

Of course, this has nothing to do with cameras. I think electronics will last just fine, but batteries and displays will not, and memory cards will be a quaint concept that you'll only see in museums, like punch-cards of the 1960s and 1970s. The logical thing is to get the most out of electronic cameras today, and let your grand-children's children display them on their mantle, if they are so inclined. Hopefully your images will last.

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