... And somewhere north of 150,000- not a typo- shutter actuations, my trusty Canon Rebel XT may have finally given up the ghost. 
I bought this thing new, from B&H Photo, in May of 2005, and it cost me right around $1,000. The total order, including two 2GB cards (the biggest I could afford at the time ) an extra factory battery, I think a polarizing filter, and a hard "wallet" for storing extra cards, was about $1,200.
One of the batteries was lost years ago, but I'm still using the other original, fifteen-year-old battery. And it still lasts a week or more of hard use between charges. I'm still using those original SanDisk "Extreme" cards, which have never failed to store an image.
Overall, one of the best purchases I've ever made. I more than got my money's worth out of it.
Today, while I was trying to shoot some pics of working on the turret lathe, it suddenly started... I guess "not fully clicking". The shutter, under normal conditions, has a "snik-zeet" sort of sound to it, and all of a sudden all I'd get is the 'snik' and then it'd flash that ERR 99 message.
According to the internet, that's sort of a 'general error' code, but apparently most often something to do with the lens or the shutter. I'll play with it a bit this evening and see if maybe I can't coax a bit more life out of it.
But really, almost two years ago, I was starting to worry- Canon warranted the XT shutter for 50K actuations, and I was, at the time, well past twice that. And I use this thing a LOT- I'd guess that at this point, some three quarters of the photos on my site came out of this camera. Just the average machine rebuild has some 200 photos- and that's usually a distillation of ten times that many taken.
Anyway, in preparation for the inevitable demise, and also to have the high-quality video capability, back in late '18 I picked up a lightly-used Rebel T5i. Something like five or six generations newer, 18-some-odd MP as opposed to the old one's 8, has video, etc.
If I can't revive the XT, I'll be moving full-time to that. I'll have to be a little more proactive on card-dumping though. The old 2GB CF cards would hold somewhere around 500 images. I'd frequently 'run out' in the middle of something, and be forced to go dump the card.
This one came with a 128GB SD, and in the two years I've used it, I've put something like 2,500 shots on it and some video, and the "frames remaining" counter still shows 999.
Anyway, if Old Faithful, which if you count the times I loaned it out, has been to ten different states including Hawaii and once through Canada, has indeed run down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible, I'll have to find a nice place of honor for it, maybe a little plaque. That's actually incredible service for modern technology these days.
Doc.
I bought this thing new, from B&H Photo, in May of 2005, and it cost me right around $1,000. The total order, including two 2GB cards (the biggest I could afford at the time
) an extra factory battery, I think a polarizing filter, and a hard "wallet" for storing extra cards, was about $1,200.One of the batteries was lost years ago, but I'm still using the other original, fifteen-year-old battery. And it still lasts a week or more of hard use between charges. I'm still using those original SanDisk "Extreme" cards, which have never failed to store an image.
Overall, one of the best purchases I've ever made. I more than got my money's worth out of it.
Today, while I was trying to shoot some pics of working on the turret lathe, it suddenly started... I guess "not fully clicking". The shutter, under normal conditions, has a "snik-zeet" sort of sound to it, and all of a sudden all I'd get is the 'snik' and then it'd flash that ERR 99 message.
According to the internet, that's sort of a 'general error' code, but apparently most often something to do with the lens or the shutter. I'll play with it a bit this evening and see if maybe I can't coax a bit more life out of it.
But really, almost two years ago, I was starting to worry- Canon warranted the XT shutter for 50K actuations, and I was, at the time, well past twice that. And I use this thing a LOT- I'd guess that at this point, some three quarters of the photos on my site came out of this camera. Just the average machine rebuild has some 200 photos- and that's usually a distillation of ten times that many taken.
Anyway, in preparation for the inevitable demise, and also to have the high-quality video capability, back in late '18 I picked up a lightly-used Rebel T5i. Something like five or six generations newer, 18-some-odd MP as opposed to the old one's 8, has video, etc.
If I can't revive the XT, I'll be moving full-time to that. I'll have to be a little more proactive on card-dumping though. The old 2GB CF cards would hold somewhere around 500 images. I'd frequently 'run out' in the middle of something, and be forced to go dump the card.
This one came with a 128GB SD, and in the two years I've used it, I've put something like 2,500 shots on it and some video, and the "frames remaining" counter still shows 999.
Anyway, if Old Faithful, which if you count the times I loaned it out, has been to ten different states including Hawaii and once through Canada, has indeed run down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible, I'll have to find a nice place of honor for it, maybe a little plaque. That's actually incredible service for modern technology these days.
Doc.
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