Warning! Before Installing the Olympus E-M1 Firmware (v 2.0), Read This!

I installed version 2.0 of the Olympus E-M1 firmware the other day.  All went very well.  No issues downloading and installing it.  But...

As soon as I turned the camera on to check the new functions, I found that by installing the new firmware ALL OF THE CAMERA SETTINGS WERE RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULTS, with only a couple of exceptions, such as the image file number, date and time.  Everything else was as it came from the factory.  What's with that?

This is a real pain!  Why in the world would Olympus design this firmware update to do this? It is beyond silly.  I recommend, if you haven't already done so, hold off on installing this upgrade until Olympus corrects this issue.  I am positive they will get a lot of feedback on this mistake.  If you still want to upgrade, write down all of your settings before hand to make it easier to reset them.

Now for the other issue I found...

I found several menu items "grayed out" and unable to be set.  For example, I was unable to set the camera to shoot RAW!  I cold set it to JPEG + RAW and the various JPEG settings, but not just RAW.  Also, I was unable to set the camera to use "L" or "H" frames per second, only single shot. There were also a couple of other settings I was unable to set.  I know that if certain settings are invoked, other settings become unavailable.  I checked and rechecked all of my settings and could not find why some settings were unavailable to me.

I then researched this on the Internet and found this was common and several individuals offered several solutions, such as being unaware that "picture controls" being set, or art filters turned on, which would allow only jpeg, etc.  None of the solutions I saw from on the web worked for me.  None of my settings should have other settings unavailable.  After all, I just spent about 15 minutes resetting them exactly how they had been set before the firmware update.  I couldn't find a reason why these settings were grayed out.

After a lot of playing with the camera, trying different things, what finally worked was to enable the HDR settings with the top left button, scroll through them turning them on, then turning them off.  That seemed to fix the "grayed out" settings issue.  Go figure?  There must be some sort of bug in the firmware that would cause that.

I just wanted to pass this along and give everyone a heads up on these issues.  I hope to write about the parts of the upgrade that I believe are most valuable to me in a few days.  In the mean time, go out and make images!

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  I add new images regularly.  Thank you.


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