Canon 7D: Shutter Count vs Battery Count

“Jimbo”, a friend of mine just bought an almost new Canon 7D for $1,275 which is $300 less than the full list price in Canada and $120 less than the “regular” street price. The camera had only 481 clicks. At least that's what the sales guy told Jimbo, his real name is Richard but everybody calls him “Jimbo.” Then Jimbo came to see me and asked me what I thought about it. The camera did look used, not too bad, but definitely a lot more than the 481 exposures claimed. He bought it from a local dealer that showed him the number of exposure:

and

On Nikon cameras, it’s possible to view the total number of exposures done by the camera just by looking in the EXIF info. You can’t do that on the 7D. Canon has a program that is not available to the public, it’s only available for its own repair centres and it reads the total number of shutter uses. As far as I know there is only one utility that can read the data and it’s from http://eoscount.com. It’s an ActiveX plugin for Internet Explorer. This only works with Windows and Internet Explorer.

I tried it, it didn’t work! Jimbo took his camera home and also tried it on his computer and it didn’t work either, but finally it worked on his laptop. Jimbo’s laptop is a Dell with Windows 7-32 bit and he uses Internet Explorer 9. The shutter count was 11,719, so Jimbo took his laptop and the camera to the store. He spoke with the sales guy and the manager which gave him a 30% discount on a 70-200 f/4IS lens. All in all, it was much more than he wanted to pay but he got so much more.

• My computer: Windows 7-64bit IE8: it didn’t work.
• Jimbo’s laptop: Windows 7-32bit IE9: it works if the CF card is in the camera.