Buying refurbished Nikon D5000?

Have the chance to buy a Nikon D5000 that's been refurbished by Nikon. Do they reset the shutter? How can I tell how many times the shutter has been tripped? I've heard good and bad stories about these cameras.

The cameras that are refurbished by the manufacturer are excellent.

"Resetting" the shutter will do nothing. If the camera has 12, 000 shutter actuation's on it, it will still have that many actuation's whether the shutter count is reset or not. Better to know how many total shutter cycles the camera actually has.

The "bad" stories you may have heard are probably about cameras refurbished by places other than the original manufacturer.

You seem to think that a cameras shutter stops working after it reaches the "test" number of shutter cycles. Nothing could be further from reality.

I have a Nikon D100 which never had any stress tests done on its shutter and it has well over 200, 000 shutter cycles on it with no problems. A colleague of mine has a Nikon D3 with over 1, 000, 000 shutter cycles and it is still working just fine.

Those tests are performed as a torture test. I doubt that you will be shooting your camera, using 20, 000 shots at a time with no breaks in the action. Just the heat alone under such a test will reduce the chances of a shutter surviving much more than 100, 000. Your camera gets to "rest" between shots, sometimes for days, maybe weeks. Fear not. Shutters in today's dSLR cameras are robust and will last long past the time you are ready to upgrade your camera in the next five to six years from now.

These days, everyone on the internet is an expert. And many of those so called experts have never actually owned the item they are criticizing.

Case in point; there seems to be some hefty criticism by some people about the new Nikon D800 - and it is not even available yet. So how can they know whether the camera is good or not without actually using it? Sounds like people with an agenda to me.

So take any story you have heard with some skepticism.

As far as the D5000 goes, realize it is an entry-level camera, and as such is lacking some features that higher-model Nikons have. That is perhaps the only "bad" stores I know of about the camera - but you have to remember it is an entry-level camera, and within that frame work, it is a good camera.