Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Shutter Counts

I received an email from Brother Mel (Mel Russell, Captured Light Photography) that pointed me in the direction of software that reportedly can tell you how many times the shutter on a particular camera has fired. The software is called Opanda and is available for download here. Unfortunately it only works on with Win98 / Me / 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista. Since I am Mac-based, this doesn't do me any good. So I did a little poking around trying to find a similar program that worked on a Mac. Eventually I arrived at Nikon's website and found this in the support section:

"Question: How many times has my Nikon camera released the shutter?

"Answer: There is no way to accurately tell the total number of times your camera shutter has released. While there are third party software applications designed to read a cameras shutter count, this number is not always accurate because the shutter release times may be reset by firmware updates, or reset in the Service Department if certain parts are replaced or other operations are performed."

That's unfortunate! Two of my cameras -- the D80 and D200 -- are rated for 100,000 shutter releases, while my D300 is rated for 150,000. That seems like an awful lot of shutter releases, but I noticed that the photographers in some forums were surprised at how many shutter releases they had racked up when they ran the software mentioned above. Seems like there should be a way to keep an eye on this. If you know of one, let me know...

2 comments:

Michael David said...

This is nice to know as I have been asked how many shutter actuations regarding cameras I've had up for bid on eBay.

David Sunfellow said...

Hey Brother Mike. I found this information helpful, too. Score one for Brother Mel telling us about this.