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What is the Shutter Life Expectancy of a DSLR Camera? - recently I became curious about this, because over the summer (2013-2014) I worked for a guy who was a private stamp collector to build a catalogue, and this required me to take photos of stamps, lots and lots of photos of stamps.

On the plus side he did have a few more interesting artefacts mostly mail paraphernalia, letters from the queen of England, German inflation covers, which I found to be an excellent example of discovering history, as it wasn't too long ago I sat in a history class learning about the events that led up to World War II, - this would have made for some great show and tell, but I doubt they would have let me borrow it, but I think the most interesting object I got to handle was hospital reports from the Napoleonic Wars, written in French that date from 1812.

Getting back on topic, I had to supply my own DSLR for this job, a few years on, and I've started to encounter a bit of clicking, slow activation when taking pictures. - I'm wondering this that's related to the amount of abuse it received from that job, so I set out to find out. - obviously the first step to anything id to just google it.

I found this article from Instant Fundas (https://www.instantfundas.com/2012/12/what-is-shutter-life-expectancy-of-dslr.html), first time reader but I was able to find my camera on the list and they even point to the software to use, good old IrfanView.

My unit is a Nikon D3100, a pretty good starter model to get into the hobby.

The steps to follow are pretty straight forward, pull the most recent photo off your camera (in my case I had to take a photo of the screen as I had formatted the card) - open the image with IrfanView, select Image from the menu bar > information, then click the EXIF info, search the EXIF tag until you find one labelled, total pictures, wow, dam son, this bad boys done 124,325 pics, 24,000 more than its total life expectancy according to Instant Fundas, biggest issue is the camera cost under $300-ish for it back in 2012 (it was a birthday gift), so if the shutter fails it may not be worth the cost of repair, although I could always give it a go myself!

I've been eyeing up a potential replacement and the Canon EOS 70D is looking like a potential candidate, although I'm not willing to pull the trigger until the shutter actually dies, plus I have a fair amount of investment in Nikon lens, batteries etc.