Originally posted by awaldram The problem is that manufacturers don't really make their own shutters, but typically source them from Copal or Seiko. If you look for LensRentals' camera teardowns, you'll see that Canon, Nikon and Sony, at the very least, get their shutters from those two companies. I don't know about Pentax, but I'd be very surprised if they were any different, since shutters are precision mechanisms (comparable to analog watches) that require considerable expertise in a field that has no other direct application in photography. So I'd blame the provider, or Ricoh's management for choosing a different set of compromises than you or I would've (faster X-sync at the expense of durability or cost). Because that's how it is: focal plane shutters need to suffer extreme stresses, perform within microscopic tolerances, be perfectly sealed against light ingress, have the curtains be very thin, and also perform reliably over the course of thousands of shutter cycles. And, most importantly, can't just be made of unobtainium, or take a gigantic amount of space inside the camera. I'd say that Ricoh, in this case, simply decided to go with the rated 300,000 thousand shutter cycle life, while having heavier curtains that simply can't travel as fast as those found in other similar cameras.