My Camera Had A Secret

Call me the curious person or whatever you want, but recently I was thinking about how close my shot counter on the camera matches with actuations registered in the camera?

I always set my cameras to keep the count of photos taken, so I was expecting something very close to my about 10200.
And what was my surprise when I saw this:

Can you see the highlighted number?
Just to make it clearer- it’s 623 919 114.

Well, now I was expecting these cameras are tested for about 150 000 actuations, which I confirmed with Nikon D300 review on dpreview.com.So imagine my surprise to astronomical number, which suggested, that for last a little bit over a year I was taking about 9 frames/minute (non stop!) – if my calculations were correct

Well, that bothered me and worried a little bit too. I was hoping it does not mean some kind of more serious technical or software problem. I had searched online and found out, I need to check my firmware version. And- well, I guess it’s good I had checked. My firmware A was still at 1.02 and version B was at desired 1.10. Even though I was sure I had upgraded it last year. My fault- I must have upgraded just one of them.

After I run the firmware update my exif read had changed to more familiar number of:

10531 was much more what I had expected in the first place.

Is that information important for picture quality- no, probably not.
I am just that curious and like to know, what is happening “under the hood”. Now- how can I possibly know, if eventually the wrong counter wouldn’t be just preview of more serious software malfunction? Or maybe this little thing would not mean anything at all in longer run?

For this little experiment I had used the Opanda Exif viewer. If you are planning on using it, just one thing to remember is, that it works only on unprocessed (straight from camera) jpeg files.

Do you know your shutter count registered in the camera?
I wonder how popular it is to keep the count of photos taken running too?

Now… what other secrets my camera is hiding from me?