How many pics can you take with a digital camera? After 1200-1500 pictures my C2500L says funny then using the autofocus. It's still working fine, but I'm a bit worried about it. And what about the shutter? What is the average lifetime for it?

Take a look at this discussion of shutter lifepsan. http://www.dphoto.us/forum/archive/index.php/t- 4531.html To summarize these posts, average number of cycles (one instance of open and close shutter) is somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 cylcles. As one poster pointed out, we seem to take more pictures with digital than with film cameras, so a hundred thousand cylces might not be that many. I have a c2500L bought used at online auction and have probably taken about 1500 pics so far. Don't know how much previous owner used it. It's amazing how many pictures you take when you don't need to spend money on film and processing! The c2500L is a really nice camera and I hope that mine lasts many years. My c2500L is an early one with version 1.0 firmware (later models have version 1.20 sticker on side) and was built in about 1999 I think. As for autofocus, mine works great as long as I have the focus mode (regular, macro, super macro) and zoom level set correctly for my distance to subject. Fortunately, the green focus indicator lamp near viewfinder flashes when focus isn't right. A few other thoughts on focus: taking picture through glass, in mirror, or scene with no contrast (like a solid grey sky) might require you to use the manual focus or focus lock modes. Window glass fools camera, which tries to focus on glass instead of your desired subject. For mirror, you need to double the normal focus distance (measure distance from camera to mirror, focus on something twice as far, then lock focus and take your pic in mirror). With SLR film camera, mirrors and glass don't cause trouble because you are focusing manually. One other note on fuzzy or dark corners on pictures: if you use filters, especially a thick filter like a polarizer, you should probably get a 43mm to 46mm adapter and use bigger filter. At widest angle zoom, my polarizer causes vignetting in corners because the filter actually is "seen" by lens in corner of pics. Oops, I should have thought of that before buying filters I guess. Hope this helps some.