Samsung NX100 Shutter Count:
There Is No Counter in the File

Samsung NX100 — what it is

Samsung announced the NX100 on 14 September 2010, seven months after the NX10 opened the NX mount. It is the rangefinder-shaped, viewfinder-less member of that first generation: the same 14.6-megapixel APS-C sensor in a flatter body, with the i-Function ring on the kit lens as its headline idea. It competed directly with the Sony NEX-3 and NEX-5 of the same year — which matters here, because those two Sonys do put a release counter in their files and this one does not.

Specification	Samsung NX100
Announced	14 September 2010
Sensor	APS-C CMOS, 23.4 × 15.6 mm · 14.6 MP effective, 14.0 MP recorded (4592 × 3056)
Mount	Samsung NX · the review body behind the files below wore the 20–50 mm f/3.5–5.6 ED i-Function kit zoom
Shutter	Electronically controlled vertical-run focal plane shutter · 1/4000–30 s plus bulb to 8 minutes
Shutter durability	No figure published by Samsung for this camera
Continuous	3 fps (about 2.9 fps measured), 8–10 frames of buffer
Sensitivity	ISO 100–3200, expandable to 6400
Monitor	3.0-inch AMOLED, 614,000 dots — no built-in viewfinder; optional EVF10 (320 × 240, 0.83×, 98%)
Autofocus	Contrast detection
Video	1280 × 720 / 30p H.264 in MP4
Storage	SD / SDHC
Size / weight	121 × 71 × 35 mm · approx. 463 g with battery and kit lens
Power	BP-1310 pack, approx. 420 shots CIPA
RAW format	SRW — read in full by this tool, but it holds no shutter-count field

Samsung left the camera business in 2016. That ends the obvious route a used buyer would otherwise take: there is no service network left to ask for a factory read-out, and no firmware update is coming that might add the field.

What an NX100 file actually gives this tool — measured

Most pages that tell you a count cannot be read are reasoning from the brand. This one was checked. On 9 November 2026, seven full-size SRW files and one full-size JPEG from Imaging Resource’s published NX100 test set were parsed with the module built from index.html — the same code the browser runs when you drop a file on the home page. All eight carry the same lens serial 237100051067 in the MakerNote, so they come from one camera and one lens.

File	Clock	Exposure returned	Shutter count
NX100hHOUSE.SRW	09:49:32	ISO 100 · 50 mm · f/5.6 · 1/20 s	none
NX100hHOUSE.JPG	09:49:32	ISO 100 · 50 mm · f/5.6 · 1/20 s	none
NX100FARI0100.SRW	13:04:55	ISO 100 · 28 mm · f/8.0 · 1/200 s	none
NX100LL64007.SRW	23:38:57	ISO 6400 · 20 mm · f/3.5 · 1.0 s	none
NX100LL64006.SRW	23:43:39	ISO 6400 · 20 mm · f/3.5 · 1/2 s	none
NX100LL64005.SRW	23:47:53	ISO 6400 · 20 mm · f/3.5 · 1/4 s	none
NX100LL64004.SRW	23:51:55	ISO 6400 · 20 mm · f/3.5 · 1/8 s	none
NX100LL64003.SRW	23:54:25	ISO 6400 · 20 mm · f/3.5 · 1/15 s	none

Nothing fails and nothing is rejected. An NX100 SRW is an ordinary big-endian TIFF: six entries in IFD0 (make, model, orientation, date, a two-entry strip pointer and the Exif pointer), nineteen in the Exif IFD, and a very large MakerNote in tag 0x927C. The parser walks all of it. There is simply no actuation field in the file to find.

Inside the MakerNote: 67 entries, and none of them a counter

“There was no room for it” is not the explanation. The MakerNote in these SRW files runs from 86,530 to 104,766 bytes, and it is a full TIFF directory of 67 top-level entries — the same 67 tag IDs in every one of the seven files. It carries no brand header: the directory begins at byte 0 of the block, and its value offsets are counted from the start of the MakerNote rather than from the TIFF header, which is the usual Samsung quirk and the usual reason a hand-rolled reader lands in the wrong place.

Here is what the named entries hold in one of those files, with ExifTool’s own names for them:

Tag	Name	Value in NX100LL64003.SRW
0x0001	MakerNoteVersion	0100
0x0003	SamsungModelID	16782092
0x0043	CameraTemperature	37.3 °C
0xa001	FirmwareName	NX100_FW_X_F1103031
0xa002	SerialNumber	the single character 0
0xa003	LensType	4
0xa004	LensFirmware	01.00_01.10
0xa005	InternalLensSerialNumber	237100051067
0xa014	ISO	6400
0xa018 / 0xa019	ExposureTime / FNumber	1/15 s · f/3.5
0xa01a	FocalLengthIn35mmFormat	30.8 mm
0xa020	EncryptionKey	11 longs, used for the tone curves
—	any shutter / actuation / release count	✗ absent

Two of those rows deserve a second look, because they decide what a buyer can and cannot do with a seller’s file.

The camera reports its own temperature, but not its shutter count

Tag 0x0043 is a real, decoded, per-frame measurement: 22.5 °C on the cold morning frame, 32.9 °C on the house shot, and 34.6 → 37.3 °C across the late-evening series as the body heats up. Samsung thought the internal temperature worth writing into every picture. The number of times the shutter had fired did not make the list.

The body serial field exists — and holds the character 0

ExifTool names 0xa002 SerialNumber, and the NX100 does write it. In all seven SRW files it contains a literal 0. The lens serial next to it, 0xa005, is a full twelve-digit number. So on this body you can tie a file to a particular lens, but not to a particular camera — which removes the one trick that works elsewhere, where two files can at least be shown to come from the same body.

In a JPEG you lose even that

The JPEG from the same frame carries a 32,904-byte Samsung MakerNote with twenty real top-level entries (plus two empty ones) instead of 67. The whole 0xa0 group — firmware, serial, lens serial, lens type, ISO, exposure — is simply not there, only 0x0001–0x0101 and the image-data blocks. There is no shutter count in it either, and no EXIF ImageNumber (0x9211) anywhere in the file. For an NX100, a JPEG is strictly less informative than an SRW, and neither contains a count.

Five frames from one session: does anything count up?

A counter has to change on every exposure, so the question can be asked directly. The five late-evening frames above come from one session on one body, in a clock order that the rising temperature independently confirms. Comparing their MakerNotes entry by entry:

Result	Count
Top-level entries byte-identical in all five frames	55 of 67
Entries that change at all	12
Of those twelve, scalars rather than image-data blocks	2 — CameraTemperature and ExposureTime
Entries behaving like a release counter	0

Fifty-five entries are ruled out immediately: a value that never changes cannot be a counter. The twelve that do change are the two scalars above plus ten per-frame image blocks — 4,704, 15,888, 8,192, 4,168 and 3,723-byte sensor, noise-reduction and tone blobs, a 360-byte array and three small white-balance and exposure arrays. Scanning inside those changing blocks at every offset, as 16- and 32-bit values in both byte orders, gives 1,986 positions that happen to rise through the five frames, 166 of them in steps of 40 or less — and every one of them traces back either to the temperature field or to data that follows the exposure, which in this series runs monotonically from 1 s to 1/15 s.

That last point is worth being precise about, because it is exactly where a confident-sounding answer would be wrong. A rising value in a five-frame series is cheap: with five frames, roughly one position in 120 rises by chance alone, which over this block predicts about 3,400 of them. Scanning the whole MakerNote in clock order finds 3,836; re-running the same scan with the five frames in scrambled orders finds 2,079 to 2,275. The clock-order figure is not a signal. It is what a monotonic exposure ramp plus noise produces, and it is the reason this page does not claim to have found a “candidate” field.

The one Samsung whose count this tool does read

There is a Samsung on the other side of this line, and the difference is instructive. The GX-10 and GX-20 of 2006 and 2008 are rebadged Pentax K10D and K20D bodies. They write the Pentax MakerNote, including the XOR-scrambled counter in tag 0x005D that this site decrypts for every Pentax DSLR since the K10D, and their DNGs were checked against exiftool 13.59 on two release files each.

	Samsung NX100	Samsung GX-10 / GX-20
Origin	Samsung’s own NX system	Rebadged Pentax K10D / K20D
MakerNote	Samsung’s own, 67 entries	Pentax format
Counter field	✗ none exists	✓ tag 0x005D, encrypted
Readable by this tool	✗ No	✓ Yes, from DNG or JPEG

So the badge on the front is not what decides it — the MakerNote is. The NX bodies are on the side where Samsung made the format decisions, and Samsung chose not to record the number.

Where the number does live — and why it comes with a warning

The NX100 does keep a count; it simply keeps it to itself. It sits on an undocumented engineering screen reached by a button combination that Samsung never published. For the NX10 the sequence has been described consistently by several owners for well over a decade; for the NX100 specifically it rests on a single unverified forum report, which is how it is presented here:

1. With the camera on and the mode dial on Smart Auto, press Down, OK, Up, OK, then Right on the four-way controller.
2. Hold the exposure-compensation button, press OK, then release.
3. The poster describes a menu appearing with a line reading Shutter Release Count: followed by the number of actuations.

The consequence for a sale is the part that matters: because the number lives in the body rather than in the file, an NX100 cannot be verified remotely. The best a seller can do is photograph that screen, which is a claim nobody can audit; and with the body serial written as 0, a buyer cannot even confirm that the photographed screen and the sample file came from the same camera.

Shutter life: no figure from Samsung

Samsung never published a durability rating for the NX100, and this page does not invent one. No actuation figure appears in the camera’s specifications, in its manual, or in the specification tables compiled by the review sites that tested it in 2010. The shutter is described there only as an electronically controlled vertical-run focal plane unit running 1/4000 s to 30 s plus bulb.

On a camera this age the rating is also not the thing most likely to end it. A 2010 mirrorless body that has been stored, carried and charged for sixteen years is far more likely to be let down by its battery, its AMOLED panel, its contacts or its mount than by a worn shutter blade — and the NX system has had no official spare parts since 2016.

Buying a used NX100 in 2026 — what to check instead

• Ask for an SRW, not a JPEG. You will not get a count either way, but the SRW carries the firmware name, the lens serial and the lens firmware; the JPEG carries none of them.
• Check the lens serial against the lens. Tag 0xa005 is the one identity in the file you can actually verify, and this tool shows nothing for Samsung in that field — so for the NX100 it is an exiftool job.
• Capture dates tell you when it was last genuinely used, if the clock was ever set — the files behind this page prove how easily it is not.
• The DCF file number on the card is a floor, not a total. It restarts whenever numbering is reset or the camera is set to reset-per-card, and it survives nothing useful.
• Test the mechanical things directly: fire the shutter across the full speed range and listen for a double or hesitant release, check the blades for oil at 1/4000 s against a bright wall, work the mount and the i-Function ring, and photograph a plain sky at f/16 to see sensor dust the camera has no shake-reduction to clear.
• Price in the battery. BP-1310 packs are long out of production; assume you are buying an aftermarket one.

Mirrorless bodies of the same era whose count does come out of the file

If what you actually want is a 2010-vintage mirrorless whose actuations can be checked from a photograph before money changes hands, the NX100’s direct rivals are the answer. This tool reads the counter from the plain MakerNote 0x0020 block on the Sony NEX-3, NEX-5 and NEX-C3, all of which were validated against exiftool 13.59 on two full-size release files per body. Later in the same family, the A5100 reads from the encrypted 0x9050 tag. Among DSLRs of the same two years, the Pentax K-x and K-r read from the scrambled Pentax tag 0x005D — the same route that makes the Samsung GX bodies readable.

For the Samsung NX bodies themselves, nothing in the file changes that answer, whatever the model: the counter field does not exist in the format.

Samsung NX100 Shutter Count — FAQ

Can I read the Samsung NX100 shutter count from an SRW or JPEG file?

No. Seven full-size NX100 SRW files and one full-size JPEG from one body were parsed with this site’s own parser on 9 November 2026: every one returned the make SAMSUNG, the model NX100, the capture date, ISO, focal length, aperture and shutter speed, and in every one the shutter count came back empty. The files are read correctly — there is no release counter in them.

Will exiftool find it where this tool cannot?

No. ExifTool’s published Samsung tag tables define 53 tags for the Type2 MakerNote this generation writes — and the NX10, NX100 and NX11 model IDs are named there explicitly — but not one of them is a shutter, actuation or release count. exiftool -ShutterCount NX100xxxx.SRW returns nothing, and exiftool -a -G1 NX100xxxx.SRW returns standard EXIF plus Samsung tags that are temperature, firmware, lens and tone-curve data. What exiftool does recover, and this tool does not display for Samsung, is the lens serial in tag 0xa005.

Does anything in the file count up frame by frame?

Only the thermometer. Across five frames from one session, 55 of the 67 top-level MakerNote entries are byte-identical; of the twelve that change, the only scalars are CameraTemperature — which climbs 34.6, 35.4, 36.2, 37.0, 37.3 °C as the body warms — and ExposureTime. A scan inside the changing image blocks finds 1,986 positions that rise through the series, but scrambling the frame order finds comparable numbers, so those rises are chance and exposure, not counting.

What is the rated shutter life of the Samsung NX100?

Samsung never published one, and this page does not invent one. No durability figure appears in the camera’s specifications or manual. The ~100,000 (est.) often quoted is a class norm for entry-level APS-C bodies of 2010, not a Samsung specification for this model.

A seller quotes a shutter count for an NX100. Can it be verified?

Not from any file, and not by any website. The only figure that exists sits on an undocumented engineering screen inside the body, so a remote buyer can at best be sent a photograph of that screen. Worse than usual here: the body serial field in an NX100 file contains the single character 0, so you cannot even prove that the photographed camera is the one that took the sample picture. Capture dates and physical condition are the honest evidence.

Is the NX100 the same as the NX10 or the NX11?

No — they are three separate bodies from the same first generation of the NX mount, and the NX100 is the rangefinder-shaped one without a built-in viewfinder. On the question this page answers they behave the same way, because they share Samsung’s MakerNote format, which has no counter field in it. The documented engineering-menu button sequences differ between them, though, so a recipe written for an NX10 should not be assumed to work here.

I bought an NX100 and no tool gives me a count. Is something wrong with it?

No. Nothing is wrong with the camera, the card or the file. This is a format decision from 2010: Samsung never wrote the value into pictures, so no software — this tool, exiftool or any website — can recover it from one. If a site shows you a number for an NX100 photograph, check whether it is simply repeating the DCF file number from the file name, which restarts whenever the numbering is reset.

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