How many hours on your EX1?

[Craig Terott]

One of my EX1s (bought in July '08) has 410 hours on it now - so far so good, no issues.

But I thought it would be interesting to survey the group and get some user feedback.

How many hours on your EX1? What kind of mileage do YOU think we can expect to get out of these cams (under average shooting conditions)? I sometimes wonder if my confidence to get up to 2K without a problem is realistic.

[Peter Wright]

How do you find out how many hours?

[Marcus Durham]

Originally Posted by Craig Terott

One of my EX1s (bought in July '08) has 410 hours on it now - so far so good, no issues.

But I thought it would be interesting to survey the group and get some user feedback.

How many hours on your EX1? What kind of mileage do YOU think we can expect to get out of these cams (under average shooting conditions)? I sometimes wonder if my confidence to get up to 2K without a problem is realistic.

Why 2k? Do you treat your cameras badly? It's not like tape where the heads had a finite life.

A colleague and I once found a pair of PD170's that had clocked up 18,000 hours + each. A large company had set up a mini TV studio in a room, locked it up and had forgotten about it. The cameras had been left on. When we looked at the hours reading we couldn't believe it. What made it even funnier was that drum run was something like 5 hours!

One of the 170's was fine, the other had developed a fault on the red channel.

OK so these cameras were static but my point is that the EX1 doesn't have any tape mechanism so should be reliable for a good long time.

[Craig Terott]

Originally Posted by Marcus Durham

Why 2k? Do you treat your cameras badly? It's not like tape where the heads had a finite life.

OK so these cameras were static but my point is that the EX1 doesn't have any tape mechanism so should be reliable for a good long time.

Every complex electro-mechanical device has a weak link. There are many components/mechanisms in the EX1 that have a finite life. Granted, we expect it farther down the road than a tape head. But still, wouldn't it be nice to know what to expect will fail first and a rough approximation of when? At some point there will be enough cameras out there with enough mileage on them to glean some information that may make failures relatively predictable.

Probably, Sony knows what component is most likely to fail first under average shooting conditions.

[Marcus Durham]

Originally Posted by Craig Terott

Every complex electro-mechanical device has a weak link. There are many components/mechanisms in the EX1 that have a finite life. Granted, we expect it farther down the road than a tape head. But still, wouldn't it be nice to know what to expect will fail first and a rough approximation of when? At some point there will be enough cameras out there with enough mileage on them to glean some information that may make failures relatively predictable.

Probably, Sony knows what component is most likely to fail first under average shooting conditions.

It would be nice to know when any piece of electrical equipment might fail, but alas it is impossible. Each camera is in a unique situation. Operating a camera in a controlled environment like those 170's I mentioned is quite different from taking a camera into a jungle. Handling, humidity, usage patterns will all play a part. Do you use the flip out LCD all the time, do you constantly plug in headphones? The LCD hinge might fail or the headphone socket could break.

There's 101 things that could fail but the biggest one has been taken out of the equation as we've waved goodbye to all those different Sony tape fault codes.

In the coming years things will crop up and we'll see a pattern but 2000 hours should be nothing for a solid state camera. Now a Z1 with 2000 hours on the drum would be a worry!

[Craig Terott]

Originally Posted by Marcus Durham

It would be nice to know when any piece of electrical equipment might fail, but alas it is impossible.

If you had the chance to re-write your response would you use the word "impossible"? lol I'm just relieved you're not managing the scheduled maintenance division for my favorite airline. :p