In their mad rush to roll out the wildly successful D7000 in time for the Christmas Season, Nikon appears to have foregone their quality assurance to leave us with a bunch of duds. Well, almost.

Everyone and their aunt seems to have one of these now, a D7000.

It IS better than it’s predecessor, the D90, but really THAT much better? Well, some seemed to have thought so, including me.

I bought mine early, just as the camera was announced, to replace my D90 travel camera. It took ages to arrive, mostly because Nikon focussed it’s sales on the Kit model for the newbies. Body-only peeps had to wait, and this is still true, months later.

The first thing I noticed with the 17-55mm lens was that focussing sometimes just didn’t activate. It seemed dead. I’d fiddle with the AF button on the front left and then suddenly it would spring into action. I uploaded the firmware upgrade but that didn’t help either. Being a sporadic problem, I went to Nikon’s Repair Center personally to show the camera. Apparently the lens locking switch needs replacement. I’m glad that they found the problem.

Then I noticed that the manual’s pages were all haywire, some pages were missing and others were out of sequence. Got a replacement from Nikon.

An acquaintance’s D7000′s light meter doesn’t work, another case for repair. This is my 7th Nikon camera but the first to need any repairs when new. Hope things clear up soon.

I just had a buyer whom I sold one of my old D300′s on Ebay to hurl mud at me screaming “but the camera has 92k shutter counts!!!! I want my money back!!!”.

Holy shit!

It seems every SLR-Buyer is looking for the shutter actuation count in order to judge the state of the camera. The shutter being almost the only moving part in the camera which is rated by the manufacturer, this would seem to make sense.

Seems to me we’re back into the heydays of the Megapixel race. We crave for a hard and fast metric to judge an item.

12 Megapixels!

Or just 5000 actuations!! (much better than 7000 actuations, isn’t it?)

Baloney.

Shutter count will not tell you:

• How badly the camera has been knocked about or dropped
• If it is a dud
• If it has been left excessively long in the rain or burning sun
• Has other inherent problems.

Although the manufacturer might be forced to cite a number in the specs, there is no hard and fast rule what it actually means. I think it is meant to convey that “you should not be concerned if your shutter conks out after this number of shots”. Or, “you should not be concerned that your shutter will die before this number of shots”.

A camera will NOT DIE the moment it reaches the rated count! (as some lady seems to believe). It is not a printer cartridge which will disable the printer as soon as the print count has been reached. In fact a rather unscientific site – but the only one I found -  seems to suggest that there is not much of a correlation between shutter counts and shutter lifetime. The shutter might die at 10k, 100k or sometimes 1million or more actuations.

The actuation count on my main camera is WAY beyond the manufacturer’s specs, but the camera works as good as new.

Replace the shutter when it dies – it isn’t that expensive (the actuation count will also be reset to 0).

So: Enjoy shooting and stop worrying about this number! It is essentially irrelevant.