Notes from a service technician: Honest Nikon engineering

Over the 14 years of working in the service, thousands of cameras of all brands have passed through my hands - from the old “boots” Canon 5D Mark II to new Sony mirrorless cameras. And do you know why repairmen love Nikon?

For honesty. Japanese Nikon engineers made a brilliant decision back in the 2000s: **record the exact ordinal the number of each shutter operation directly into the encrypted frame metadata service block (MakerNote)**.

Why do Canon and Sony always have a headache with this, while Nikon has everything perfect?

Clients always come to me before making a second-hand purchase. Canon owners are forced to look for old utilities for Windows 7, connect the carcass with a cord or install custom Magic Lantern firmware. At Sony, electronic frames are often confused with mechanical.

Nikon works differently:

• Cannot be reset by simple formatting:Data is written directly from the EEPROM chip motherboard into each RAW (.NEF) or JPEG file.
• Hardware counter:The EXPEED processor adds one to the `ShutterCount` value strictly after each physical cycle of the curtains.
• No cables:There is no need to carry a laptop to a meeting with a seller on Avito. I took a picture and posted it on the phone - ready.

An example from my workshop

A week ago they brought the D750. The seller claimed that “the camera was lying on the shelf, the mileage was 12 thousand.” I take out the SD card, I upload a test image to our service - there are 218,000 frames on the screen! The seller simply reset the folder numbering to menu. But the hard-wired `ShutterCount` tag in MakerNote could not be fooled.

Summary table of ease of checking mileage by brand

Brand	Where is the mileage stored?	How to check without a computer
Nikon	In every file (MakerNote)	Upload 1 photo to our website from your smartphone
Canon	In carcass memory (not in all models)	You need a PC and special software via USB
Sony	In EXIF ​​(with a jumble of quiet frames)	Upload photos via web service