Shutter count

I haven’t been writing for quite some time as I have been busy with projects. Things are calming down for a week or two so I am taking time to clean my equipment (my memory cards for sure have seen better days but they still work perfectly). While getting some dust out of my D750’s (I will write an article on how to do that and more important how not to do that) I have been asking myself on how much the shutter count might be (I am checking the count every couple of months).

Why do I want to know that

The shutter of these DSLR’s are built to support multiple frames per second with shutter speeds of 1/8000s. The D750 supports 6.5 frames per second, whereas its buffer is capable to hold 25 FX images. This means you can continuously shoot for 3.8s by when the buffer will be full and depending on the cards write speed, data needs to be written to the card. The camera may not let you take shots until the buffer has free capacity. This of course doesn’t mean that I use my cameras like machine guns firing shots like crazy. Anyways, this article is not about buffer speed and fps but finding out on how much the current shutter count is. Therefore back to the question: „Why is it important to know the current shutter count?“. I am using my cameras both for private as well as for commercial projects. According to Nikon, the shutter of the D750 has been tested up to 150’000 images. No think of a situation where you would be working on a paid project or you are on vacation planning to capture the beautiful things surrounding you – and all of a sudden your camera would stop working because the shutter has come to an end? This would be a bummer. Therefore it is essential to know your cameras health level in terms of shutter count.

How to check the shutter count

The shutter count is part of the Exif information of your files. If you don’t have a tool to read the Exif data, you can simply upload your image on https://www.camerashuttercount.com/ (free of charge) and the service will read for you the shutter count.

My current shutter count

I use two D750’s that I purchased in May and October 2015 (I will write another article on why I am always carrying two bodies with me). So both cameras are just about 3 years old. The following shows the count for each camera.

If I only would own one camera, it would soon be gone as I have done almost 130’000 clicks so far. That’s slightly 80 clicks per week on average (of course there is weeks where I shoot a couple of thousand shots and some where I hardly do any). The good news is, that the cameras will last another 3 years at most (fingers crossed).

Let me know your thoughts

I hope this article was helpful for you. If there is anything you are looking for, please let me know and I try to find examples to discuss.

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