User.81858
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- Charles
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Hi all could the constant use of video mode cause deterioration of the sensor of a DSLR such as Nikon 7000 series?
'Constant' is limited to the max recording time available, which for DSLR's is limited for tax purposes so they are not classed as video recorders.
There is no reason to believe that Nikon, Canon et al would produce a camera with the built-in ability to self destruct ... they are widely used by, for example, wildlife photographers to record video footage.
Look CCTV cameras have electronic shutters and work for years without any sensor degradation.
I work in industrial imaging and have deployed camera inspecting 100,000's of thousands of parts a day, many of these are happily working 10 years down the road. If they fail its because of other issues, eg network interface or on-board memory issues (which happen with any 'computer'
The only time I've encountered sensor degradation is with cameras in the nuclear industry, where the radiation causes lenses to brown and knock out pixels over time.
A mechanical Shutter is prone to failure, as any mechancial device is.
The sensor will almost certainly outlast your time with the camera. I would have no hesitation in buying a camera that had a lot of 'hours' of video recording. In reality its just effectively a computer at the end of the day.
I would say though that long non-stop video in consumer cameras does cause them to run warmer than usual, and as long as they have been designed for this purpose there will be no issue.


Evening all. New here.....
My thread was not about the shutter but the effect on the sensor. My reason for the query is that there is a D7000 for sale in Cash Generator and it comes with lots of video equipment, giving me to think it had been used mainly for video. I took an SD card and took a couple of images to get the shutter count. The shutter count was under 6000, I did notice however that the image quality was not up to Nikon standards and was even bettered by my Samsung compact. For this reason and that the vendor would not negotiate on I deal I did not buy.
It got me thinking that in video mode the sensor pixels must change their state thousands of times more than in normal picture mode hence the question.![]()