shutter cycles

[pwp]

Would they really be happy with 100 photos from a wedding?

I wouldn't. We got way more than that, and the photogs were shooting Mamiya 645s (the film ones...and I've got the stack of negatives to prove it...).

Back in the film days I shot maybe a dozen weddings a year...mostly for corporate clients. Shot on EOS 1n bodies, they always seemed to average around 15 rolls of 36 exposure neg film. That equals 540 mostly thoughtfully composed shots. 20 rolls was HUGE. A massive 720 frames! OMG.. And it was tough to edit.

My weddings PA has probably dropped to more like five or six a year, still mostly for corporate clients, and the thought of being restricted to 540 shots scares me. These days weddings seem to run to around 3000. After a brutal edit, the client gets around 250 shots. Comparing the wedding images now with ten years ago, the freedom to shoot completely unrestricted is delivering brides great shots that leave the old 15 roll wedding deliveries gasping for respectability.

So in the context of this thread, full time wedding shooters would hit the shutter life cycle sooner than most. But a 100 photo wedding? Maybe this was the number of images delivered to the couple rather than the number of frames the photographer shot on the day.


PW

 

[DB]

trying to understand a bit of the technology here - Why these have a life expectancy?
I mean 150 000 shots is not thaaaaat much.. i know that it can go beyond that number but also it can happen to never reach those numbers. does canon replace the shutter after it dies? did film SLRs had this life expectancy as well?

All machines that have 'moving parts' will eventually fail or break. The technical jargon is MTBF or Mean Time Between Failures. Take your home PC, the most vulnerable component is your disk drive because it has a drive head that moves across a spindle of discs (memory, processors etc. are just based upon an electric charge passing through a silicon wafer - there are no moving parts in RAM or Intel CPUs). In the 1980s and 1990s, most disk drive manuacturers e.g. Seagate, Samsung, Motorola etc. would quote speed, size, cache and mtbf (used to be about 2,000 hours of actual use - how often is your drive in physical use?). Nowadays, tech has moved on quite a bit, hence the move to SSD (Solid State Drives essentially flash memory) similar to CF or SD memory cards. Your camera memory card has no moving parts, so in theory, could last forever.

Automobiles have lots of moving parts, which is why most last about a decade or so. Cameras have fewer and fewer moving parts, but the shutter actuation is the largest (and most important) one, which is why Canon et al hedge themselves by quoting probably quite conservative actuation lifespans -> it is the weakest link in the body of a camera (thing most likely to break with high usage), but obviously they're designed to be replaced for a couple of hundred bucks.

 

[tron]

i just had my shutter explode on my 5Dc last fall. canon replaced it and cleaned the whole camera for $200.00. well worth the price!

final shutter count was 186,000 on a 150k rated shutter.

The 5Dc has a 100k rated shutter not 150k. But this shows how good the shutter is (since it lasted 86% more).

 

[briansquibb]

SSD and flash memory has limited life span called erase-write cycle. And the funny thing is, as silicon process advances (50nm > 30nm > 20nm > 10nm > 5nm?), the erase-write cycle shortens. To give you a concept of this cycle, the high end SLC 50nm flash memory cell has erase-write cycle of 100,000. The latest consumer MLC 20nm flash memory cell has erase-write cycle of 1000(!). Yes, 1000 am I'm not kidding.

Hence flash memory is a weirdo child that goes backwards in terms of reliability.

Just had my 3 year old SSD fail on me

 

[akiskev]

After ~60k shots on my XTi, I'm starting to get some random "Error 99" codes. It must be shutter or mirror because I hear a weird mechanical sound when error 99 occurs.. If I turn the camera off and then on, it's good as new! But for how long....?

 

[Marine03]

What is the shutter life of a 450D? Mine is several years old and I have close to 30K.

Just did my second wedding with it, and depending on how much I was paying as a customer if I got 100 photos from my wedding that sounds perfect to me. Tell me other than feeling like you got your money's worth because you get a disk with 1000 pics on it, whats the point? In my house we have 5 photo's from our wedding printed out. For someone without an eye for photography its beyond necessary.