On Jul 17, 12:42 am, (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
In article . com,
[...]
Please get back here in two years and report whether the shutter of
your DSLR has failed or not. Real empirical data is better than
extimates in advance.

No need to wait; peoples' cameras are already experiencing the
shutter failures as reported in several Yahoo groups, and in one,
the Nikon-D70, a survey is presently ongoing collecting more data
and the 50,000 count seems definitely real (noting I haven't followed
reports in any of the Canon groups, but one person's Rebel (at work)
failed around 40,000 shutter releases per the EXIF data).

It would have been extremely rare for consumer film SLRs to have
that many shutter releases though my Dad's Contax did and it did
require shutter replacement; given the number of slides I inherited
he may have just exceeded 30,000 shutter releases (including after
the repair) some 20 years ago when he died.

[...]
An old story regarding how long something might work: when magnetic
tape recorders became widely available some time in the 1960's, there
were rumors that magnetic recordings would somehow "fade away" by
themselves after several decades. Recently I've been converting old
vinyl records and tape recordnings into digital formats, and I then
listened to old magnetic tapes I hadn't listened to for a very long
time. The oldest of these recordings were 38 years old -- and they
were still fine and well!

Same for me, including even 5-1/4" floppies from the late 1970s and
early to mid 1980s -- they still are readable.