Originally posted by unixrevolution I dropped one on the floor the other day from about chest-height. It's fine.
Then again, I also had one just plain fail on me when I took a photo. Mirror never came back down. It was pretty beat up, though, and I was NOT the first owner.
The mirror return issue is fixable.
That's how my inherited Spottie started to fail. About six months after I started putting it through it's paces, the mirror wouldn't come back down at speeds slower than 60th. You had to fire off a few frames before the mirror would return (obviously not practical if the camera is loaded). The CLA fixed that up.
A lot of very heavy handling can cause said mechanical workings to drift out of whack, but generally, we're talking a lifetime of very heavy handling before noticeable issues occur, if people's experiences here are anything to go by.