Canon PowerShot S110 Shutter Count:
CHDK Runs Here, the Counter Still Does Not

Canon PowerShot S110 — what it is

Canon’s own Camera Museum lists the PowerShot S110 as marketed in October 2012, a year after the S100 it replaced. It pairs an approximately 12.1-million-effective-pixel 1/1.7-type CMOS sensor with the DIGIC 5 processor under Canon’s HS System badge, behind a bright f/2.0 24–120 mm-equivalent 5× zoom, and Canon’s entry for the camera singles out two changes against the S100: the ISO ceiling raised from 6400 to 12800, and autofocus lag at the wide end cut from 0.40 to 0.25 seconds. The visible changes were elsewhere. The S110 dropped the S100’s GPS receiver in favour of built-in Wi-Fi — including a Camera Access Point mode that transfers images to a phone with no network present — and replaced the fixed screen with a 3.0-type capacitive touch panel that works together with the lens-barrel control ring. It was itself replaced by the S120 in August 2013, the last of the enthusiast S-series.

Why no tool can read an S110 count

ShutterCount works by finding a counter the camera itself wrote into the file. Nikon puts it in MakerNote tag 0x00A7, Sony in the encrypted 0x9050 block, Fujifilm in 0x1438, Pentax and Ricoh in the XOR-scrambled 0x005D. Canon does write one — but only on specific bodies, and the S110 is not among them.

On Canon the field lives in a CameraInfo or FileInfo MakerNote blob whose layout changes from model to model, so the offset has to be confirmed body by body. In CR2 files that blob carries a usable count only on the professional 1D and 1Ds line; Canon does not write it for consumer bodies at all — not for the 5D, 7D or Rebel DSLRs, and not for the PowerShot compacts. On those cameras the actuation counter is a hardware register inside the body, readable over USB from an EOS camera and never copied into an image. The single Canon compact with a confirmed offset in this tool’s support matrix is the PowerShot G5 X Mark II, at 0x0A95 in CR3 and 0x0293 in JPEG — and the S110, a 2012 camera, predates the CR3 container entirely.

So an S110 file opens and parses without trouble; it simply has no actuation field in it. What comes back is the ordinary EXIF: camera model, firmware version, capture date and time, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, focal length, and the serial number Canon writes into the MakerNote. This is not a gap a future release of the parser might close. exiftool decodes Canon’s MakerNote in considerably more detail than this tool does and reports no shutter count for a PowerShot either, because the camera never recorded one.

Dropping an S110 file into the tool is still worth doing when you are checking a listing: the firmware version, the serial number and the capture dates are real, verifiable facts about the camera that produced that file, and on a body old enough to have changed hands several times they are often enough to catch a misdescribed camera. The actuation total will not be among them.

The four routes people suggest — and what each is worth

Search for this question and you will be offered the same handful of answers. One of them is half-right for this camera, and the half that is wrong is the half everyone repeats.

1. CHDK — it does run here, and it still has no lifetime counter

CHDK, the Canon Hack Development Kit, is third-party firmware that loads from the SD card at boot and exposes functions the stock firmware hides: RAW capture on cameras Canon never gave RAW to, scripting, exposure overrides, long exposures, a USB remote trigger. Pages written about the S-series routinely claim CHDK is not available for it. For this body that is simply wrong. The project’s autobuild server carries CHDK 1.6.1 builds for the S110 in three firmware versions — 1.01B, 1.02B and 1.03A — and the camnotes.txt inside the 1.03A build (build 1.6.1-6355, dated 20 July 2026) describes it as a beta CHDK for the S110 with no known issues outstanding. The confusion comes from the successor: it is the DIGIC 6 S120 that has no port.

What CHDK does not add is a lifetime actuation counter. The function whose name invites that reading is get_exp_count(), and it is present in both the Lua and the uBASIC interpreters shipped in the S110 build — alongside get_jpg_count() and get_raw_count(), which estimate how many frames still fit on the card. CHDK’s own script documentation defines get_exp_count() as the file number of the last exposure: the last four digits of the most recent file name. It survives switching the camera off and swapping cards, it does not go down when you delete the last photo — and it returns to 0 after the card is formatted in the camera, and rolls over at 9999. That is a DCF numbering counter wearing a promising name, not a record of how many times this shutter has fired since it left the factory.

2. The vers.req service screens — a G-series report, unverified here

Older Canon compacts can be made to show extra firmware screens: a file named vers.req on the card, or holding SET while pressing DISP in playback, steps through version information, and on some bodies one of those screens carries a line reading Total Shoot: followed by a number. CHDK’s distribution even ships the trigger file — the S110 build contains a vers.req whose entire contents are a joke, because only the file name matters. The owner reports that describe a shot-count line, though, are about the DIGIC 4-era G-series, principally the G10, G11 and G12. No verified report shows that line on an S110, Canon documents no shutter-count readout in the camera’s specifications, and the firmware generation is a different one. Trying it costs nothing and takes a minute; promising that it will work here would be guessing.

3. EOSInfo or gPhoto2 over USB — EOS only

These tools ask the camera for its internal counter over Canon’s PTP protocol, and they are the standard answer for EOS DSLRs whose CR2 files carry no count — a 5D Mark III or a 70D will give up its true actuation total that way. The S110 will not. It is not an EOS body, it does not implement the EOS property those tools query, and neither project lists it as supported. There is no USB route to an S110 actuation count outside Canon’s own service tooling.

4. Canon service — the one authoritative figure

A Canon service centre can read the camera’s internal counters during an inspection or repair. On a camera of this age that is rarely worth paying for on its own, but if the seller has service paperwork from a past repair, it is the only genuinely authoritative usage figure that exists for the body — worth asking about, and worth more than any number a website offers you.

The ex-drone S110: the provenance matters more than the count

Most pocket compacts live in a bag and fire a few thousand frames in a decade. The S110 had a second career in which it did nothing of the sort. The fixed-wing senseFly eBee mapping drone flew Canon S110 cameras as its standard payload, in RGB, NIR and RE (red-edge) versions — a configuration documented in published UAV remote-sensing work, where all three were flown over the same test area alongside a Parrot Sequoia. A survey payload shoots on an interval for the length of every flight, which is precisely the workload those bodies were bought for, and the airframes have since been retired and parted out.

So a used S110 can be a camera that was taken out twice a year, or a camera that flew mapping missions until the drone was scrapped — and the second one may well look better, because it lived in a foam cradle rather than a pocket. Since no file carries a count, there is nothing to arbitrate between the two except what you can see and what the seller will tell you. Three things are worth looking for:

• A colour cast that will not go away. An NIR or RE body has had the filter in front of its sensor changed; ordinary daylight scenes come out strongly cast, and no white-balance preset corrects it. Ask for an unedited JPEG of a normal scene before anything else.
• Mounting marks and missing trim. Payload cameras are strapped, screwed or glued into a cradle, often with the strap lugs, screen bezel or battery door marked up; some were run with the grip plate removed.
• A CHDK folder on the card. Mapping operators automated these cameras with CHDK intervalometer scripts. A CHDK directory, a DISKBOOT.BIN or a leftover script on the supplied card is not a fault — it is a clue about how the camera spent its life.

None of this is an argument against buying one. A well-kept survey S110 can be a perfectly good camera, and the shutter is not the part that tends to end these bodies. It is an argument against trusting a number, because the body with the highest frame total is the one most likely to show a low file index.

On a pocket compact, the shutter is not what wears first

Most pages on this site are about a focal-plane shutter: two blade curtains behind a lens mount, a defined wear item with a manufacturer figure to measure against and a known replacement price. The S110 has nothing of the sort. Its shutter is a small unit inside a sealed, fixed lens assembly, and two things follow from that.

The retracting barrel does more mechanical work than the shutter does. The lens extends from a 26.9 mm-deep body on every power-on and retracts on every power-off, in an unsealed camera that lives in a pocket or a bag. That mechanism, not the shutter, is the classic failure point of the whole S-series — and on a camera flown as a drone payload, every mission added another cycle to it. The family history is explicit: Canon issued a service notice in 2012 for the S100, the model immediately before this one, after a part inside the lens could come loose and produce a lens error; free repair under that notice ended on 30 September 2017. That notice is about the S100, not the S110, and it should not be read across to this camera as a defect. What it should tell you is which part of an S-series body to test hardest.

A frame total would not equal an actuation total anyway. The S110 has both a mechanical and an electronic shutter, and all video recording reads the sensor electronically and moves nothing mechanical. Canon’s specification does not break down which mechanism each still mode uses, so even a reliable frame count — which you cannot get here — could not be converted into a mechanical actuation figure for this body.

Shutter life: no figure from Canon

Canon has published no durability rating for the PowerShot S110, and this page does not invent one. The 100,000-, 150,000- and 200,000-actuation figures that circulate for Canon bodies are EOS ratings — they describe focal-plane shutter units in interchangeable-lens cameras, tested and published for those products. Carrying one across to a shutter built inside a fixed compact lens would be a guess dressed up as a specification.

Where this site quotes ~100,000 actuations (est.) for compacts of this class, that is a class norm offered for orientation and labelled as an estimate. It is not a Canon figure for this camera, which is why it stays out of this page’s meta description and out of the specification table above. In practice, on a camera marketed in October 2012, age is the more useful variable: battery health, screen condition and barrel wear tell you far more about a fourteen-year-old S110 than any actuation estimate would.

What you can actually check on a used S110

1. Ask what the camera did for a living. Pocket camera, or drone payload? The answer changes what you are looking at more than any number would, and an honest seller will say. A photo of an ordinary daylight scene settles whether the filter is standard.
2. Read the dates, firmware and serial from sample files. Ask for two or three unedited out-of-camera files, ideally from different folders. Capture timestamps show when the camera was actually used — a body with nothing newer than 2016 in it has been in a drawer, which is its own kind of risk — and the serial number lets you check the listing photos against the file.
3. Treat the file numbering as a floor, not a total. The DCIM folder and file index on original files tell you the camera has taken at least that many frames since the last reset. Numbering can be restarted and cards get formatted, so it never proves a total — and on this model, as above, it can be badly misleading in the flattering direction.
4. Power-cycle it a dozen times and watch the barrel. This is the check that matters most on an S-series body. The lens should extend and retract smoothly and identically every time, with no grinding, no hesitation at the end stops and no error message. Do it more times than feels polite; intermittent faults are the ones sellers do not mention.
5. Run the zoom through its full range under load. Go from 24 mm to 120 mm equivalent and back repeatedly, including while the camera is writing to the card, and listen for a motor that hunts or stalls.
6. Fire the shutter across its whole range and listen. Take single frames at 15 s, 1/60 s and 1/2,000 s, then run a burst. The sound should be identical shot to shot, and exposure should be even across the burst; hesitation at slow speeds or a frame that comes out darker than its neighbours is the failure to listen for.
7. Check for dust in the lens and on the sensor. A retracting barrel on an unsealed body is the classic route for dust. Photograph a bright, even surface at the smallest aperture and inspect the frame at 100 %, then look into the front element at an angle under a light.
8. Exercise the touchscreen, the control ring and the radio. Swipe through the menus, tap to focus across the whole frame, turn the lens ring through several full rotations in each direction, and pair the camera with a phone once — Wi-Fi is the feature this generation was sold on, and NB-5L cells this old are frequently tired.

None of this produces a number, and on this camera nothing will. What it produces is a judgement about condition — which on a sealed pocket compact is the more useful thing anyway.

Compacts where the count does come out of the file

If verifying usage from a single file before buying matters to you, it is worth knowing which pocketable cameras allow it. The tool runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded — and returns a count for Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, Fujifilm RAF, Pentax and Ricoh PEF/DNG, and the Canon bodies with a validated offset. Among the compacts an S110 buyer is likely to be cross-shopping, Sony’s RX100 line is the closest rival and the RX100 VII is confirmed in this tool’s support matrix through the encrypted Sony tag 0x9050. The Ricoh GR III and its successors write a release counter into the Pentax-format MakerNote tag the same parser decodes, while the GR II and older Ricoh compacts store none. Fujifilm’s X100S — an exact contemporary of the S110 — writes an ImageCount into its RAF files. On the Canon side, the one compact with a confirmed offset is the PowerShot G5 X Mark II. Every other PowerShot, this one included, is on the other side of that line.

Canon PowerShot S110 Shutter Count — FAQ

Can I check the S110 shutter count from a CR2 file?

No. Canon writes a ShutterCount field into EXIF only for its professional 1D and 1Ds bodies; on every consumer body, PowerShot compacts included, the counter stays in the camera’s hardware and is never copied into the image. An S110 CR2 or JPEG reads normally — model, firmware, dates, exposure data, serial number — but holds no actuation total for this tool, for exiftool, or for anything else.

Does CHDK run on the S110, and does it show the shutter count?

It runs: the project’s autobuild server carries CHDK 1.6.1 builds for S110 firmware 1.01B, 1.02B and 1.03A, and the 1.03A build describes itself as a beta port with no known issues. It does not show a lifetime count. get_exp_count(), the function people reach for, is documented by CHDK as the file number of the last exposure — the last four digits of the newest file name — which returns to 0 after an in-camera format and rolls over at 9999.

What is the rated shutter life of the S110?

Canon has not published one. The 100,000 to 200,000 figures quoted around Canon cameras are EOS ratings for focal-plane shutters in interchangeable-lens bodies and do not apply to a shutter inside a fixed compact lens. The ~100,000 (est.) this site uses for compacts of the class is an estimate for orientation, not a Canon specification.

Is there a hidden menu that shows total shots?

None is documented for this body. The vers.req file and the SET+DISP sequence that open firmware service screens are reported to show a Total Shoot: line on DIGIC 4-era G-series compacts, principally the G10, G11 and G12. CHDK’s S110 package does ship a vers.req, but no verified report shows a shot-count line on an S110 and Canon documents none.

Why are there so many ex-drone S110s for sale?

Because the senseFly eBee mapping drone flew the S110 as its standard payload, in RGB, NIR and red-edge versions, and those airframes have been retired. A survey camera fires on an interval for every flight, so its lifetime total can be far above a pocket camera’s while the body looks barely used — and an NIR or RE example has had its sensor filter changed, which shows up as a heavy colour cast in ordinary photographs.

Why does Canon not store the count when Nikon and Sony do?

It is a long-standing design decision rather than a technical limit — Canon tracks the value internally and exposes it in EXIF only on the 1D and 1Ds professional line, leaving USB as the route for EOS bodies and nothing at all for compacts. Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm and Pentax/Ricoh write it into the file on most of their range, which is why those cameras can be verified from a single sample file and a PowerShot cannot.

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