Hidden threat when buying a used SONY NEX-5R

The SONY NEX-5R compact camera once became a real hit among travelers, street photographers and video bloggers. The advent of hybrid autofocus made it extremely agile. Due to its tiny size, this carcass was taken with them everywhere: to the beach, to the mountains, to dusty cities. And it is this “everyday camera” format that poses the main danger in the secondary market.

Many sellers claim that they rented only on vacation. However, when the camera is always at hand, the frame counter spins at incredible speed. Shooting time-lapses of sunrises or serially capturing the emotions of pets can wear out the mechanics to a critical level in a couple of years. There is no point in judging the NEX-5R based on scratches on the screen - you need to look solely at the “odometer” of the shutter mechanism.

Technical safety margin of a hybrid baby

There is always a price to pay for compactness. The engineers placed a curtain-slot shutter into the miniature body, which produces a characteristic sound that is quite loud for its size. The company has never officially announced the guaranteed service life of this part, since the camera belongs to the amateur segment.

The experience of repairmen shows that the mechanics of the NEX-5R cope with 50,000 - 70,000 operations without any problems. This is a good indicator for such a miniature device. But if you are offered an option with a mileage of under 100 thousand, this is a lottery, where the chances of the springs breaking or the lamellas jamming are extremely high.

How to extract mileage data from the depths of the processor

Despite the amateur class, the camera has full system accounting. The BIONZ microprocessor continuously records each cycle of movement of the curtains. The best thing about this system is that the data does not just lie in inaccessible service memory - it is written to a photo file (ARW or JPEG format) every time.

This information is "hardwired" into an EXIF ​​metadata utility block (known as MakerNotes). No amount of flashing, formatting flash drives or hard resets can reset this counter. It will always show the honest truth about how many times the camera took the picture.