Shutter Life Expectancy.

If it's not already been posted, I thought this might be a useful link.


http://www.olegkikin.c​om/shutterlife/

A little old... most of the current cameras aren't there. Heck, bodies from several years ago aren't there.

I have no real fear of my shutter dying. A pro I purchased a lens from recently told me he has a body with near 500,000 actuations on the original shutter. The 150k mark is just where Canon expects the shutter will make it to, not where it is guaranteed to fail.

FrayAdjacent wrote in post #15232095
I have no real fear of my shutter dying. A pro I purchased a lens from recently told me he has a body with near 500,000 actuations on the original shutter. The 150k mark is just where Canon expects the shutter will make it to, not where it is guaranteed to fail.

You would be surprised at what count some cameras have failed, 5D11 at 7000 and one at 1000 according to the list.

This stite has been posted before and pretty much debunked. There are too many issues with the site to be able to use their data. First, it is voluntary so a user is free to put in whatever number they please. Look at nearly all the cameras that have several million actuations listed. This throws of the numbers significantly. Second, most cameras do not have a reliable way to get the shutter count so I'm guessing that most of the numbers are estimations. Lastly, reporting a number when the shutter is working tells me nothing. In any case, the data is too suspect to be able to make any sense of it.

killwilly wrote in post #15232341
You would be surprised at what count some cameras have failed, 5D11 at 7000 and one at 1000 according to the list.

I don't see why that is surprising. There is always a small number of any mechanical product that fail in the first few days, due to a faulty component or faulty assembly. Those products are then simply returned to be replaced with another one (hopefully better put together).

There will always be a small peak of failures in the early days, then cameras that get past that will generally go on for a fairly long life and a failure somewhere around the average life expectancy, with many going past it and some way, way past it.

Average life expectancy is, at best, a rough guide for comparison. A 1D series camera can be expected to typically last much longer than a rebel class camera. However, some rebels will live longer than some 1Ds.

Statistical averages will not tell you how long your single camera will last. It could fail after a few clicks or go on to shoot 500,000. My older bodies (20D and 5D) have both gone well past the "official" rating, hopefully my newer 40D and 5D III will continue that trend. The 5D III has just made it past 10,000 clicks so has hopefully got past the early failure phase.

killwilly wrote in post #15232341
You would be surprised at what count some cameras have failed, 5D11 at 7000 and one at 1000 according to the list.

Right, and you would be surprised at how many miles various high level performance cars blew a gasket. I have a Rebel which is already more than 10,000 cycles past its "rated" shutter life. Stop worrying about the rated shutter life and just shoot...

I don't even know what the figures given by Canon really mean. They aren't specified as a Mean Time Before Failure, so I don't know if that's what it really is...that is to say, I don't know that Canon uses industry standard MTBF determination practices to arrive at the figures they quote. If they did, it's easy enough to write "MTBF," but they don't, so I suspect they're using some other practice.

What kind of average is it then? A mean over their tested cameras? A modal of their tested cameras?

All the numbers really mean to me is that they've designed some models to be relatively more robust than others, and that from model version to version, they sometimes improve the robustness of that model.

I'm still looking but I remember reading a white paper a while back where it was listed as MTBF. That would make sense as it's pretty much an industry standard and inventing your own standard is pretty meaningless. Heck, if I were inventing my own I would have choose a metric to make my number look huge like the number of photons passing the shutter blades or some other silly metric.,

RDKirk wrote in post #15236241
What kind of average is it then? A mean over their tested cameras? A modal of their tested cameras?
.

I have always assumed it to be an "estimated average" and loosely estimated at that. If they were testing them and finding an actual figure, there is some pretty radical rounding off being applied. I would expect tests to result in rounded off figures more like 45,000 / 110,000 etc. rather than the figures we are given (50,000 / 100,000 / 150,000 / 300,000) which are very round numbers.

I pay little attention to them, other than to get a rough guide as to how robust the camera is likely to be. I have never yet had an actual failure of the shutter, my 20D had around 120,000 on it when I sold it, still working well, my 5D I still use regularly and it has around 150,000 on it (so both are well past the ratings which I believe were 50,000 and 100,000). My 40D has only done about 35,000 since I bought it (and roughly 6,000 before that) so hasn't yet reached it's rating, but is still performing flawlessly. My latest acquisition, a 5D III, has only just about been "run in" so should hopefully last me several years as my original 5D has done (and is still doing).

The ratings for the 40D and 5DIII are higher than for there forebears, so will hopefully also sail past the shutter counts I clocked up on the older models. I am under no illusions though, and accept that they could fail at any time.

I have seen some stories of shutter failing after a shots and some shutters that lasted 5 times past its expected life cycle. There's really no way to tell how long it will last or even a rough estimate of how long it will last per individual shutter mechanism.

You will hear more stories about equipment breaking online than the actual rate because people usually come online to complain about their sad stories.