Firmware Friday: Updates for Nikon DSLRs, Olympus mirrorless and Canon Cinema EOS movie camera
posted Friday, January 29, 2016 at 3:07 PM EDT
The weekend beckons once more, and with its approach comes Firmware Friday, our regular roundup of all that's new in the world of camera firmware. This week, we've got quite the list of updates on which to report, with no less than 12 different interchangeable-lens cameras receiving new firmware.
We'll start this week with Nikon, whose new firmware for the D3300, D5300 and D5500 all landed in the last few days. All three updates share support for two new lenses, specifically the AF-P DX NIKKOR 18–55mm f/3.5–5.6G VR and AF-P DX NIKKOR 18–55mm f/3.5–5.6G zooms. In all three cases, a new Optical VR option has also been added to the shooting menu, allowing control of vibration reduction on the AF-P DX NIKKOR 18–55mm f/3.5–5.6G VR lens. For the Nikon D5500 alone, there's also a new custom menu option a5, "Manual focus ring in AF mode", which can be enabled or disabled for either of the two new lenses.
That's not all for these updates, though. All three cameras also get a bug fix for negative exposure compensation applied when processing raw files in-camera through the retouch menu; previously, these values weren't respected correctly. And there are also some changes specific to each camera: The D3300's Auto Info Display will now turn off properly at focal lengths above 55mm, and the D5300 will no longer lock up when quickly scrolling through menus for certain languages. The D5500, meanwhile, no longer outputs audio noise to external HDMI recorders at four-second intervals, and also improves exposure smoothing issues when using the interval timer.
That's it for Nikon's updates, which you can obtain at the links below:
And so we come to Olympus. Here, the list of updated cameras is lengthy indeed, but we can actually summarize the updates very quickly given that they largely share the same tweaks. In all cases, the new firmware for Olympus' mirrorless cameras adds compatibility with the Windows 10 operating system. It also adds support for Olympus lenses with in-lens image stabilization. For the E-M5, E-M10, E-M10 Mark II, E-P5 and E-PL7, the in-lens stabilization can be activated at the same time as using roll stabilization from the in-body image stabilization system. However, five-axis sync IS -- a feature of the latest E-M1 and E-M5 Mark II firmware which allows both in-lens and in-body stabilization to be combined for a greater effective strength -- is not available to any of the cameras being updated today. (And nor can the E-PL6, E-PL5 or E-PM2 stabilize roll using the in-body stabilization in concert with that from the lens.)
If you own one of the cameras affected by Olympus' updates, you can bring it up to the latest firmware release using the company's Digital Camera Updater app. More details on the update process can be found here.
Finally for this week, we move to Canon. The company has this week announced a firmware update for the Cinema EOS C300 movie camera, specifically for those models which have been upgraded to support Dual Pixel CMOS AF. The new firmware version 2.1.5.1.00 update fixes a problem where, with Dual Pixel CMOS AF active and set to continuous autofocus, the waveform monitor, vector scope and edge monitor couldn't be displayed.
And that's it for this week's roundup. Check back next time for more news from the firmware front!
(Camera parts image courtesy of Kelly Hofer / Flickr; used under a Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0 license. Image has been modified from the original.)