43 Rumors

Update your Olympus PEN (the firmware is now here)

http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/oima_slr_penfirmware.asp?intCmp=geto_rdrct_penfirmware

Auto Focus Performance
This update will improve camera AF performance when shooting both stills and videos with the E-P1, E-P2 and E-PL1 cameras when using any Micro Four Thirds or Four Thirds lens. Auto Focus Lock time when shooting stills is improved by 15%. Auto Focus tracking accuracy when shooting movies is also improved.

Viewfinder/LCD Simultaneous Playback Function
This upgrade also brings additional display functionality to the E-P2 and E-PL1 cameras when fitted with the VF-2 Electronic Viewfinder. Photographers using these combinations can now view menu and recorded images on the LCD while the VF-2 Electronic Viewfinder is in use.

Movie-Still-Compatible (MSC) Lens Compatibility
This update also ensures that like the E-PL1, the E-P1 and E-P2 camera models are fully compatible with and able to take advantage of two recently announced and soon-to-reach market lenses; the M. Zuiko Digital™ ED 9–18mm F4.0–5.6 and M. Zuiko Digital ED 14–150mm F4.0–5.6 lenses. Olympus is designating these two lenses as MSC, or Movie-Still-Compatible. They are optimized for shooting high definition video with accurate and silent autofocus.

Some Leica news…

Thoughts about the Panasonic adapter patent

Agent00soul

3 years ago | Reply

I updated my E-P1 and it does indeed feel a bit faster with the kit lens and the 20/1.7. The 20 feels a bit faster than the kit lens in normal use but when I counted how many focus operations i could do in one minute (by half-pressing repeatedly), there wasn’t much difference. With the 20 it managed 49 focus operations and with the kit lens it managed 47. Unfortunately, I didn’t test this before the upgrade.

RANDOM NAME

I’m very impressed with this. Using the 14-42 kit lens it seems WAY faster than it was, with nowhere near as much ‘searching’.

Brian

I updated my E-PL1 this morning and the promised autofocus improvements are real. Autofocus also seems to hunt less.

Chow

I agree. With the 20mm it’s faster.. Didn’t try my other lenses yet..

Miroslav

This is the real deal! The dpreview test http://www.dpreview.com/news/1004/10042202olypenfirmware.asp shows that with this update E-PL1 is as fast as the G1 with the same lens!

wt21

It is a bit faster, but the hunts less thing is what’s got me a bit excited. Also, it returns a “can’t lock focus” result more quickly, which is appreciated.

Jeff

did my E-P1 last night as well, didn’t see much of a difference in my room but that was pretty low light. Today out and about it is certainly faster, not a lot, but enough. More importantly, it’s dead on, I’ve tested it on cars going by at 35MPH and it didn’t miss a single shot with either the 17mm or the oly 14-42. I’m very pleased with this update