Shutter Life - non-serious post :-)

[AdamJ]

It's nice to see that the 1D-X's shutter life of 400,000 actuations takes a full 9 hours 16 minutes to be exceeded, when used at 12fps.

This is better than the 1DIV shutter's lifespan of 300,000 actuations which, at 10fps, takes a measly 8 hours 20 minutes to be exceeded.

;D

(Both times are obviously theoretical and ignore all other factors).

 

[Fleetie]

Reminds me of the Veyron's fuel capacity; About 10 to 15 minutes with the pedal to the metal!

Not sure about its tyre life at that rate; anyone know?!

 

[smirkypants]

You know, I was actually wondering about this when I saw a video on the 1DX and the guy was popping photos like an uzi. I thought, "now this can't be good for shutter life." I blew through a quarter million shutter actuations on my 1D4 relatively quickly and I'm now to the point where I use my 7D for less important jobs because it's almost a disposable camera to me.

I really hope there will be some way to dial down the FPS because 99% of the time I wouldn't want to be popping that many. I'd like to be able to have more options than either 4 or 12. It would be great to be able to tell the machine exactly how many FPS you want, program that like into a C1-C3 button, turn and let 'er rip.

The point of 12 FPS is "there's no way I can miss this!" If you have to fumble through layers of menus to turn it on, it sort of misses the point. If you leave it on all the time, you're filling your hard drive with needless photos and putting unwanted wear and tear on your machine.

 

[Herb]

It would be great to be able to tell the machine exactly how many FPS you want, program that like into a C1-C3 button, turn and let 'er rip.

And if not FPS, at least be able to tell the camera how many shots to take with one click of the shutter release. I once fired a French military machine gun that had single shot, full auto, and three-round bursts. It would be nice to be able to program the camera to get exactly five shots, or ten, or whatever each time you pressed the shutter release.

 

[wickidwombat]

I bet some demo units have already exceeded the shutter life, thats just based on all the youtube waffle with people blatting off a thousand rounds going oooh ahhh fast

 

[candyman]

It would be great to be able to tell the machine exactly how many FPS you want, program that like into a C1-C3 button, turn and let 'er rip.

......... It would be nice to be able to program the camera to get exactly five shots, or ten, or whatever each time you pressed the shutter release.

+1

 

[Meh]

I really hope there will be some way to dial down the FPS because 99% of the time I wouldn't want to be popping that many. I'd like to be able to have more options than either 4 or 12. It would be great to be able to tell the machine exactly how many FPS you want, program that like into a C1-C3 button, turn and let 'er rip.

Well... technically... the 1DX has a number of options.... 14, 12, 3, and 1 ;D

I don't know, I think just 3 or 12 is about right. For most situations 3 is fast enough... e.g. people moving around at an event. But when 3 is not fast enough... e.g. fast moving sports, then you want as fast as possible. For example, if you want to get an image of a batter making contact with the ball or a soccer player with the ball just bouncing off her head and little beads of sweat spraying... you just can't time that and even at 10 fps (0.1 seconds between frames) you can miss that moment between frames.

 

[wickidwombat]

you do know the 1 series have 2 burst modes, fast and slow. slow is about half the speed of the full FPS

 

[Meh]

you do know the 1 series have 2 burst modes, fast and slow. slow is about half the speed of the full FPS

Yep but actually the 1DX has a third super-high-speed continuous of 14 fps but jpeg only and no focus tracking because the mirror stays up. And you can probably do 1 fps manually... until your finger gets tired

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

What type of CF card will you use to store those 400,000 images?

 

[bvukich]

What type of CF card will you use to store those 400,000 images?

Tethered over Gig Ethernet of course!

 

[DavidRiesenberg]

And at about 25MB per RAW file, it comes to a measly 10TB of disk space.

 

[Viggo]

I really hope there will be some way to dial down the FPS because 99% of the time I wouldn't want to be popping that many. I'd like to be able to have more options than either 4 or 12. It would be great to be able to tell the machine exactly how many FPS you want, program that like into a C1-C3 button, turn and let 'er rip.

Well... technically... the 1DX has a number of options.... 14, 12, 3, and 1 ;D

I don't know, I think just 3 or 12 is about right. For most situations 3 is fast enough... e.g. people moving around at an event. But when 3 is not fast enough... e.g. fast moving sports, then you want as fast as possible. For example, if you want to get an image of a batter making contact with the ball or a soccer player with the ball just bouncing off her head and little beads of sweat spraying... you just can't time that and even at 10 fps (0.1 seconds between frames) you can miss that moment between frames.

Actually the 1-series can set the two speed H and L burst to whatever framerate you need, (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 and 12) for the 1d X.

 

[Minnesota Nice]

Reminds me of the Veyron's fuel capacity; About 10 to 15 minutes with the pedal to the metal!

Not sure about its tyre life at that rate; anyone know?!

5 miles at top speed and you need new tires that are 10,000 dollars a piece.

Anyways, that is actually pretty interesting that it takes that long to exceed the shutter life haha.

 

[dr croubie]

It's nice to see that the 1D-X's shutter life of 400,000 actuations takes a full 9 hours 16 minutes to be exceeded, when used at 12fps.

This is better than the 1DIV shutter's lifespan of 300,000 actuations which, at 10fps, takes a measly 8 hours 20 minutes to be exceeded.

And the D4 with its 10fps and alleged 400,000 shutter lifespan will die in 11 hours 5 minutes.

(And I seem to remember a quote from Clarkson when he was driving the Veyron, something like "at top speed, the tyres will last you 20 minutes, but that's ok, because you'll be out of fuel in 15")

 

[D.Sim]

It's nice to see that the 1D-X's shutter life of 400,000 actuations takes a full 9 hours 16 minutes to be exceeded, when used at 12fps.

This is better than the 1DIV shutter's lifespan of 300,000 actuations which, at 10fps, takes a measly 8 hours 20 minutes to be exceeded.

And the D4 with its 10fps and alleged 400,000 shutter lifespan will die in 11 hours 5 minutes.

(And I seem to remember a quote from Clarkson when he was driving the Veyron, something like "at top speed, the tyres will last you 20 minutes, but that's ok, because you'll be out of fuel in 15")

Wasn't it James May who was in the Veyron?

Just how accurate are the shutter life expectancies though? Will each camera automatically *click* off, after 400,000 clicks or will it be a +/- 10% life expectancy? Or even more?

 

[dr croubie]

Just how accurate are the shutter life expectancies though? Will each camera automatically *click* off, after 400,000 clicks or will it be a +/- 10% life expectancy? Or even more?

I'm not sure how the curves go for shutter lifetimes (but i've done other engineering quality control before), it's going to be an 'average lifespan' thing. Yours might go after 100k, 200k, or it may last for a million. Add up everyone's shutter life worldwide though, stick them on a graph, choose an 'acceptable' number of failures, and read off how many shutter clicks that corresponds to.

The definition of 'acceptable' is the problem, there is no definition. 99.9% of shutters lasting to at least 400,001 clicks would be a nice result for them, but if your computer CPU was only accurate 99.9% of the time the whole thing wouldn't even boot, or billions of dollars of credit-card transactions would go wrong each day (to borrow examples I remember from RQC lectures at uni).

 

[willrobb]

Shot a 6 hour celebrity fashion/music show recently where I was trying to keep my work load down and tried to shoot only 5-10 images of each model and I ended up with 4000 images from my 5DmkII. The guy next to me was shooting with a 1DmkIV and he was constantly rattling shots off, reckon he had 20'000 shots plus by the end ofthe day.....I wonder how long his 1DmkIV will last? How long for him to get through a 1DX.

 

[gmrza]

Just how accurate are the shutter life expectancies though? Will each camera automatically *click* off, after 400,000 clicks or will it be a +/- 10% life expectancy? Or even more?

I'm not sure how the curves go for shutter lifetimes (but i've done other engineering quality control before), it's going to be an 'average lifespan' thing. Yours might go after 100k, 200k, or it may last for a million. Add up everyone's shutter life worldwide though, stick them on a graph, choose an 'acceptable' number of failures, and read off how many shutter clicks that corresponds to.

The definition of 'acceptable' is the problem, there is no definition. 99.9% of shutters lasting to at least 400,001 clicks would be a nice result for them, but if your computer CPU was only accurate 99.9% of the time the whole thing wouldn't even boot, or billions of dollars of credit-card transactions would go wrong each day (to borrow examples I remember from RQC lectures at uni).

There is one view of shutter life expectancy here:
http://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/canon_eos5dmkii.htm

When looking at some of the data, I don't think, however, that the sample sizes are large enough to draw statistically relevant conclusions. The data is, from what I can see, also not verified, so people could be submitting garbage.

If the data are to be believed, there are 5DIIs out there with millions of shutter actuations ... and still clicking. Whether the risk of working with a 5DII with a million clicks on the shutter is acceptable? That is another question.