Nikon Troubleshooting and Care

[springsteelmedia]

I've had a used Nikon D800 for just under a year. Only 26,000 shutters and the camera froze up and the display screen lagged painfully slow. I took it to Dodd and it needs a replacement of the Shutter Component Assembly Unit.

I'm moving forward with the repair, but I'm wondering as a concert photographer if I should ease on the burst shots? My last gig I took well over 4,000 photos in a matter of 5 hours. Does that wear on a camera and create these issues? Or is it just old fashioned bad luck?

 

[Golem]

I've had a used Nikon D800 for just under a year. Only 26,000 shutters and the camera froze up and the display screen lagged painfully slow. I took it to Dodd and it needs a replacement of the Shutter Component Assembly Unit.

I'm moving forward with the repair, but I'm wondering as a concert photographer if I should ease on the burst shots? My last gig I took well over 4,000 photos in a matter of 5 hours. Does that wear on a camera and create these issues? Or is it just old fashioned bad luck?

At only 13 frames per minute my gut feeling is bad luck.

OTOH the 810 replaced the 800 due to shutter problems with the 800 and there was a recall to instal new shutters. I dont know, but my guess is that the recall has expired.

 

[JoeW]

I've had a used Nikon D800 for just under a year. Only 26,000 shutters and the camera froze up and the display screen lagged painfully slow. I took it to Dodd and it needs a replacement of the Shutter Component Assembly Unit.

I'm moving forward with the repair, but I'm wondering as a concert photographer if I should ease on the burst shots? My last gig I took well over 4,000 photos in a matter of 5 hours. Does that wear on a camera and create these issues? Or is it just old fashioned bad luck?

Without seeing the camera itself, I'd say "bad luck." I've got a D800 with over 50,000 shutter activations.

As for how often you're on multiple FPS, I think the answer to that is: it's a function of how good the memory cards are that you have (so you don't have a lag and miss some good shots because your buffer is full and still writing to the card) and also how much editing you want to do.

I've been a Nikon shooter for most of my life. For sports, wildlife, and photojournalism work I've shot with multiple FPS much of the time and never had an issue (as long as I had a good memory card set in the body) and this is with a range of different Nikons. For instance, I had a D4 (granted, different body) that I had over 400,000 shutter activations on, probably 1/5th of those were multiple FPS and I never had a shutter problem with it. I shoot a lot of hummingbirds (multiple FPS--I'll come away with 1,000+ exposures from a day of shooting them), I use a D500 for that and have never had a shutter problem

 

[CapNBall]

Nikon advertised them with a life expectancy of 200,000 actuations. It's likely either bad luck, or environmental gunk getting in during lens changes.

 

[Hof8231]

From what I've gathered, high shutter counts can definitely impact camera longevity, though 26,000 shots shouldn't usually cause issues like freezing.