I'm a little nuts when it comes to shooting digital cameras. No expensive film to buy and process - cards are cheap and filling them is free..and that last click might be a keeper...don't wanna miss anything...but...
The DSLR is still a mechanical beast. Every time you take a picture, the shutter actuates and like anything mechanical, the shutter on a DSLR can and will wear out.
Think of the Shutter Count (or actuations) much like the number of miles on the odometer of your car. When you buy a new car, the salesperson is
not going to tell you how many miles you can expect to get out of it - but...when you buy a used car, odometer reading it is probably going to be one of your first questions.
Most consumer grade cameras are good for at least 50,000 actuations while some of the professional-grade cameras average 200,000 and on up to half a million.
Your camera itself isn't going to tell you how many times it's fired, but its fairly easy to find out. Nikon and Pentax write the shutter count in the EXIF data while Canon does not (but stores it in the camera all the same - conflicting info here...see below). There are several applications that you can use to find the shutter count for your camera, but the simplest way for me (as a Pentax shooter) was to upload a recent .jpg to this site:
www.shuttercounter.com
Also, they claim to be able to get info from some Canons on that site (confirm please?).
I was astonished to learn that I was pushing 135,000 actuations on my K-x (although my KD100 only has `7,000 on it). That's a good bit over the average...but I'm worrying a little now.
www.olegkikin.com/shutterlife/ is building/maintaining a user-sourced database for shutter life expectancy. Have a look there to see what kind of mileage you can expect from your shutter.
Finally, having the shutter wear out is not the end of the world. Replacing a shutter costs (on average) between $200 and $300 dollars and may be indicated if you love your camera - or it's not quite time to upgrade yet.
