Is my shutter on it's way out?

squishy

squishy

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Adam
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I was in the middle of shooting a burst of shots with my 40D yesterday, when one turned out like this:

Es-6201.jpg


The camera kept of shooting fine and I didn't notice any sounds out of the ordinary, but I'm not sure I would have as I was focussing on the viewfinder.
All the subsequent shots have been fine, but this has got my worried that my shutter is about to fail.
I've seen this exact pattern before from other people when their shutter has failed.
The camera hasn't had very heavy use, it's still under 20,000 actuations.

Now here's the thing. I've still got a general warranty on the body from a minor repair and general service I've had done before, so if my shutter does fail, I should be able to get it replaced under that warranty.
Do you think they will accept this frame as evidence of a shutter on the brink of failing? Or will I actually have to wait until it goes completely dud?
I'll be contacting the repair shop to see what they say, but it would be helpful to have some feedback from you guys.
That would really annoy me, because I use it for wildlife, I don't want my shutter failing in the middle of shooting something rare.

Or is this just a complete fluke that the shutter can very occasionally just miss fire slightly?
I've been racking my brains to think of anything else that could have caused this, but I can't think of anything. It doesn't look like what I've seen before from corrupted memory cards, and it can't be a problem with the card reader because this appeared like this on the LCD image before I'd uploaded it to the computer.

Any thoughts?
 
No, I checked with them after it was done.

It was a general service as well as repair, so the warranty covers any faults.
 
Have a look at this thread (googled it) it may be the same problem as what your having Shutter prob 40d it shows a few pictures similar to yours with the slightly darker half of the image...
 
Possibly.

Except it is actually that the top half is to light, rather than the bottom too dark, and it hasn't happened at all since, not matter what shutter speed I set.


But it is similar.
 
What shutter speed was that? I've had 2 shutters fail on me and both were solid black lines, rather than darker.
 
Looking at the image being brighter at the top I'm wondering if you're aperture blades might be sticking. That would explain the over exposure. It's possible that the flicker of the shutter actuation might have freed the blades and caused them to move to the correct position. Remember that the aperture sets before each photo too, not just the shutter.

The aperture is built into the lens so take note of which lens you used and see if it does it with any others. If not then its probably a lens issue rather than a body issue.

It is possible that a shutter curtain is sticking, may just be worth taking a loom at the shutter and aperture blades to see if there are any foreign objects in there.
 
Neil, when you've seen it before, do you know if it happened every time after it started happening, or has it happened one or two times as isolated incidents before failing completely?

One of the people I was out with had their D300's shutter fail and produce a pattern almost identical to this, but it happened every time once it had started happening.
 
From memory it starts as an intermittent fault then gets more persistent.

Put mirror lockup on and have a look at the shutter blades. One may be out of alignment

Neil
 
Thanks for your help.
I can't see any miss-alignment in the shutter blades.


I'll get on the phone to the repair shop tomorrow.
 
Mark G said:
Looking at the image being brighter at the top I'm wondering if you're aperture blades might be sticking. That would explain the over exposure. It's possible that the flicker of the shutter actuation might have freed the blades and caused them to move to the correct position. .......
Click to expand...
The image is exposed from the bottom upwards so sticking (or slow) aperture blades would over expose the lower part of the frame.

Bob
 
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