Canon PowerShot S95 Shutter Count:
Not in the File, Possibly in the Camera

Canon PowerShot S95 — what it is

Canon’s own Camera Museum lists the PowerShot S95 as marketed in August 2010, the successor to the S90 of October 2009; US units shipped from late August at around $400. It is a coat-pocket camera built around a bright f/2.0 lens and a 1/1.7-type sensor, with the lens-barrel control ring that gave the S-series its character — assignable to ISO, shutter speed, aperture, focus or exposure compensation — and a mode dial that goes all the way to full manual. It shoots RAW, which in 2010 almost no pocket camera did, and it writes those files as CR2.

Two details matter more than the rest for anyone reading this page in 2026. The sensor is a CCD — Canon’s overview text calls it “a low-noise, high-sensitivity 10-megapixel CCD sensor” — and the S100 that replaced it in December 2011 moved the line to CMOS. And the processor is DIGIC 4, the generation whose service screens the rest of this page is about. The Wikipedia article additionally describes the S95 as the first compact with Hybrid IS; Canon’s own specification lists the stabiliser only as “Lens-shift type”, so that claim is repeated here as someone else’s, not asserted.

Why no file-based tool can read an S95 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 S95 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 S95, a 2010 camera, predates the CR3 container by most of a decade.

So an S95 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 in the file.

Dropping an S95 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 service screens: the one route that is reported to work on this body

This is where the S95 parts company with its own successors. On the S110 and the S120, the hidden firmware screens that show a shot total are a DIGIC 4-era G-series story — the G10, G11 and G12 — and no verified owner report puts that line on either of those later cameras. The S95 is a DIGIC 4 camera, contemporary with the G12, and owners have reported the line on an S95 specifically.

The clearest account is a 2011 thread in DPReview’s Canon PowerShot Talk forum, titled plainly enough “How many pictures were taken with my S95?”. What the posters there describe is this:

• An empty file named vers.req in the root of the card. The name is the whole mechanism; the contents are irrelevant. One owner reported that a file called ver.req produced fewer pages and no count, and that adding the s — vers.req — was what made the figure appear. It has to be a genuinely plain text file: an editor that silently appends .txt or .rtf gives a file the camera ignores.
• Or the button route. In playback, hold FUNC/SET and press DISP, repeatedly; the display steps through service pages. Posters describe four of them — firmware and serial on the first, a build date and a “NoError” line on the second, a “Mecha Firm Ver.” page among them — with the figure labelled Total shoot on the third.
• What people saw. One poster reported an S95 bought in January 2011 reading over 22,600 shots and working perfectly — which is the useful part of the anecdote: it is a number in the range you would expect of a well-used compact, not a file index that had been reset.

Test the number before you trust it — it takes two minutes

There is no need to take a forum post’s word for what the line means, because the camera will tell you. Three readings separate a real body-held counter from the DCF file index that websites pass off as a shutter count:

1. Read it, shoot exactly twenty frames, read it again. A release counter has moved by twenty. If it moved by a different amount, it is counting something other than releases — saved files, for instance, which is not the same thing in burst or bracketing modes.
2. Delete those twenty images and read it a third time. A counter held in the body does not go down. If the figure drops, you are looking at a count of what is on the card.
3. Format the card in the camera and read it once more. This is the decisive one. The DCF file number returns to zero after an in-camera format; a lifetime counter does not move at all. If the number survives a format unchanged, it is a property of the camera, which is what you wanted to know.

Run that sequence once on a body you already own and you have established, for your own camera and firmware, what the line actually is. That is worth more than any assertion on this page or any other.

CHDK runs on the S95, and 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: scripting, exposure overrides, long exposures, a USB remote trigger, RAW on cameras Canon never gave RAW to. It does run on this camera. The project’s autobuild server carries CHDK 1.6.1 builds for S95 firmware 1.00E, 1.00H, 1.00I and 1.00K. The 1.00K package was downloaded while writing this page — build 1.6.1-6355, dated 20 July 2026 — and its camnotes.txt identifies the body as PID 12818, records that “S95 hardware and firmware is similar to S90”, names DRYOS version 2.3 release #0045, and states that PTP remote shooting and live view are supported.

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 modules shipped in that S95 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.

One small difference from the sibling pages is worth recording because it cuts the other way for once: the CHDK package for the S110 ships a vers.req file in the archive, and the S95 package does not. If you want to try the service screens on an S95 you will be creating that file yourself, which is a thirty-second job in any plain-text editor.

Two other routes get suggested and neither applies here. EOSInfo and gPhoto2 ask a 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 S95 is not an EOS body, does not implement the EOS property those tools query, and is not listed as supported by either project; CHDK’s own PTP support is a different thing entirely. A Canon service centre can read the camera’s internal counters during an inspection. On a fifteen-year-old compact that is rarely worth paying for on its own, but if a seller has service paperwork from a past repair, it is the only genuinely authoritative usage figure that exists for the body.

Why this question is being asked about a 2010 compact at all

For most of the last decade an S95 was a $60 camera. It is not any more. The compact-camera revival has pushed clean examples of the fast-lens, CCD-sensor generation past what they cost new — restored S95s are listed by specialist retailers in the hundreds of dollars, and ordinary used listings sit in the same territory. The S95 is squarely in the middle of that trend for a specific, checkable reason: it is the last of the S-series to use a CCD. The S100 moved to CMOS in December 2011, and a CCD rendering is precisely what the buyers driving these prices are after.

That changes what this page is for. When a camera is worth $60, nobody needs to verify its wear. When the same camera is worth several hundred and is fifteen years old, the ordinary used-camera questions apply — and the ordinary used-camera answer, “ask the seller for a file and read the count”, does not work on it. The honest version is that you are buying on condition, provenance and the evidence of your own hands, with the service screen as a bonus if you can get at it.

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 S95 has nothing of the sort. Canon’s specification does not even name a shutter mechanism for it — the entry is a speed range, 15 to 1/1,600 second, and nothing more. Whatever is in there is small, sits inside a sealed fixed lens assembly, and cannot be replaced as a service part in the way an EOS shutter unit can.

Three things do the wearing on this body, and none of them is counted anywhere:

• The retracting barrel. The lens extends from a 29.5 mm-deep body on every power-on and retracts on every power-off, in an unsealed camera that lives in a pocket. That mechanism is the classic failure point of the whole S-series. The family’s cautionary tale is the model immediately after this one: Canon issued a service notice in 2012 for the PowerShot S100 after a part inside the lens could come loose and produce a lens error, with free repair under that notice ending on 30 September 2017. That advisory is about the S100 and should not be read as a defect claim against the S95. What it should tell you is which part of an S-series body to test hardest.
• The control ring and the mode dial. The ring is the reason to own this camera rather than a contemporary point-and-shoot, and it is a mechanical part that has been turned by every owner since 2010. A ring that skips, a dial that no longer detents cleanly or a body that forgets its custom mode are faults you will notice every time you shoot.
• Everything else that is fifteen years old. NB-6L cells of this age are frequently tired; a 461,000-dot LCD can delaminate or dim; and a CCD of this vintage can develop hot or stuck pixels that show up on long exposures.

A frame total would not settle any of that even if you had one. Video recording reads the sensor electronically and moves nothing mechanical, Canon publishes no breakdown of which still modes use which mechanism, and the camera’s own high-speed and Low Light modes behave differently again. A number from the service screen is a usage indicator, not a wear measurement.

Shutter life: no figure from Canon

Canon has published no durability rating for the PowerShot S95, 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 August 2010, age is the more useful variable: battery health, screen condition and barrel wear tell you far more about a fifteen-year-old S95 than any actuation estimate would.

What you can actually check on a used S95

1. Ask the seller to walk the service screens and photograph the result. It costs them two minutes and an empty vers.req file. If a Total shoot line appears, you have a figure to think about — and if you later get the camera, the twenty-frame test above tells you what that figure was worth.
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 2014 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.
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 28 mm to 105 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 1/1,600 s, then run a burst in P mode. 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. Shoot a long dark exposure and look for stuck pixels. A 15-second frame with the lens cap on, at base ISO, inspected at 100 %, tells you what fifteen years have done to a CCD of this generation.
8. 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 f/8.0 and inspect the frame at 100 %, then look into the front element at an angle under a light.
9. Exercise the control ring, the dial and the battery. Turn the ring through several full rotations in each direction, step the mode dial round twice, and ask how old the NB-6L is — a camera rated for approximately 200 shots on a fresh cell will manage considerably fewer on a tired one.

None of this produces a number from a file, and on this camera nothing will. What it produces is a judgement about condition — which on a sealed pocket compact, bought at 2026 prices, is the more useful thing anyway.

Compacts where the count does come out of the file

If verifying usage from a seller’s file before buying matters to you, it is worth knowing which pocketable cameras allow it. The tool runs entirely in your browser 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 S95 buyer is likely to be cross-shopping, Sony’s RX100 line is on the same side of the line as the S95: no DSC-series Sony decodes a ShutterCount. The Ricoh GR III and its successors write a release counter into the Pentax-format MakerNote tag the same parser decodes — while the small-sensor GR Digital generation, the S95’s actual contemporary, stores none. Fujifilm’s X100F and later write an ImageCount into their RAF files, though the X100 and X100S do not. 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 S95 Shutter Count — FAQ

Can I check the S95 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 S95 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.

Is there a hidden menu on the S95 that shows total shots?

Owners report one, and on this body the reports are about the S95 itself rather than borrowed from the G-series. An empty plain-text file named vers.req in the card root, or FUNC/SET held while DISP is pressed in playback, steps through firmware service screens; posters describe four pages with a Total shoot line on the third. Canon documents none of it, the sequence varies with firmware, it has not been verified on a body for this page, and in the same discussion another Canon compact returned an implausibly low figure the same way. Entering undocumented service screens is at your own risk.

How do I know whether that number is really a shutter count?

Test it. Read it, shoot exactly twenty frames, read it again — a release counter moves by twenty. Delete those twenty files and read it a third time; a counter held in the body does not go down. Then format the card in the camera and read it once more: the DCF file index that most “shutter count” sites actually show returns to zero after a format, and a body counter does not move at all.

Does CHDK run on the S95, and does it show the shutter count?

It runs: the autobuild server carries CHDK 1.6.1 builds for S95 firmware 1.00E, 1.00H, 1.00I and 1.00K, and the 1.00K package (build 1.6.1-6355, 20 July 2026) notes that S95 hardware and firmware are similar to the S90’s and supports PTP remote shooting and live view. 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, which returns to 0 after an in-camera format and rolls over at 9999. Unlike the S110 package, the S95 build does not ship a vers.req file.

What is the rated shutter life of the S95?

Canon has not published one — its specification gives a speed range of 15 to 1/1,600 second and does not even name the shutter mechanism. 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.

Why is an S95 so expensive now?

It is the last fast-lens S-series body with a CCD sensor — Canon’s own overview calls it a low-noise, high-sensitivity 10-megapixel CCD, and the S100 moved the line to CMOS in December 2011 — and CCD compacts are what the current revival is chasing. Clean examples now ask more than the camera cost new in 2010, which is precisely why checking wear on one is worth the trouble.

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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