You’re probably wondering what had happened. Imagine one day you are photographing a photo session and all of a sudden your camera fails and quits working. But there is no mirror assembly that part is done away with on a mirrorless camera.Īfter all, they´re called 'mirrorless', not 'shutterless', for a reason.THIS IS A GUEST POST COURTESY OF DANIELLE SULLIVAN PHOTOGRAPHY Thus, of course there will be wear as time goes by/as it´s activated when shooting. In mechanical mode, there IS a mechanical shutter working. I'm new to Olympus but what gets me is that there are so few moving parts, so why is the shutter rated to 100k? The mirror and shutter on a DSLR are real moving parts that will shake themselves apart, on the Olympus, there's the sensor, bug and proud in front of you. I'm just wondering if anyone has actually seen their shutter need replacing, and if so, when. I just picked up a used E-M1, and while everything works just fine, the shutter count is pretty high - has anyone seen higher than this? I'm not terribly concerned because a:it shows no signs of having any problems, and b:electronic shutter means I don't need to use the physical shutter for most day-to-day shooting anyway. There is no ' Fix it, no matter what the cost !!!' or ' Fix it, I wave the warranty, if it breaks - it breaks !!!' option. Keep in mind that this is not ideal, just different from other brands. At least this was the case for the ones I had repaired. The repairs come with a 90 days warranty which, if I'm not mistaken, cover the whole camera, not just the repair. The chances of several essential parts/boards failing are quite unlikely, unless the camera is drowned, burnt or takes a bullet.Ī shutter replacement (and all the cleaning, calibrations and checks that come with opening the camera) will definitely fall under that repair. That's the flat repair fee at Olympus US (handled at Precision Camera, so they can be used as well, it's the same thing with a slightly different invoice - one will say Olympus, the other - not).įrom experience, that's a ' If it's fixable, we'll fix it, and we'll replace everything that we find to need fixing' fee, with the exception of water damage and any such heavy damage affecting several essential components and/or an impossibility to assure a quality repair), which would place the device in BER (Beyond Economical Repair) status. That looks like a 'we'll see what's wrong' fee. I paid $500 for a really nice EM1 on eBay with under 20,000 exposures.

IMHO, when a shutter fails in an EM1, switch to exclusively using the electronic shutter or sell it for parts on eBay. But by the time the shutter needs to be repaired, the mirror assembly (lucky us) also is in need of a major repair so that usually adds another $800 or so. Nikon charges around $800 to replace a shutter but they go through the whole camera and make sure everything is up to snuff for that price performing minor repairs at no extra charge. So it is possible that most of those were shot with the electronic shutter. The shutter count includes the electronic shutter and there is no way to separate out the mechanical from the electronic count that I've been able to find. However a shutter could fail at the first exposure or last a million shots though the chances go down the further one is from the design point.

In other words, about 2/3rds of all shutters can be expected to last about that long. The shutter is rated for 150,000 shots but that is based on a statistical average within the first standard deviation.

Shutter counter broken