Mon Sep 17, 2012 12:04 pm
Shutter life given by the manufacturer is just a guideline. I think the D80 is rated for 100,000 actuations or something like that - Nikon does not guarantee that it will last that long, and likewise they don't have it programmed to break on the 100,001st actuation. Most manufacturers use what's called an 80/20 rule for guidelines like this - that means that in their testing, 80 percent of the tested cameras lasted for at least 100,000 shutter actuations, so they chose 100,000 as the guideline number. That means 20 percent of them failed before 100,000. Of the 80 percent that made it to 100,000, some percentage of those may have lasted to 200,000 or even more.
So the bottom line is - there's an 80 percent chance that your camera is less than halfway through its shutter life. And the odds are fairly high that it's less than a third or even a fourth of the way through its shutter life. Go out and take pictures, and don't worry too much about your shutter.