Aging and digital camera images

[MJFickle]

Do digital cameras lose their ability to capture colors accurately as they age?

[jrhoffman75]

I never heard of that being an issue.

[smack53]

I suppose if the image processor starts to deteriorate, the color can be affected. It's very rare since the image processor would normally fail completely. If the camera has been exposed to a lot of static electricity, that could wear out the image processor much sooner that it should. The most likely scenario is that the white balance may just need to be tweaked. All these are not very common. I have an 11 year old PowerShot A510 that still has excellent color in the photos, and operates like it did when it was new.

Steve M.

[Waddizzle]

Generally speaking, binary based electronics do not degrade over time.  Digital electronics will either work as designed, or utterly fail to operate properly.  Think of as it's either being on or off, go or no go.  On the other hand, analog electronic components can and do suffer from performance degradation over time, often times to the point of equipment failure.

DSLR cameras are a hybrid of digital and analog electronic components.  The most significant analog component would be the image sensor, which performs an analog to digital conversion of light striking its' surface.  Even then, when an A/D converter fails, it is usually the digital portion that fails and the component will experience partial to complete failure, without any gradual performance degradation. 

In other wods, you will rarely get any warning before digital equipment utterly fails to operate.