E-PM2 video recording duration

yjaquinas wrote:

I have emailed Olympus tech support asking:

1. what is limiting the longer video recording,

• The EU, one of the largest consumer electronics markets in the world, levies a 4.9-12.5% duty on video cameras manufactured outside the EU; video cameras are defined as cameras capable of continuously recording a video of 30 minutes or longer.
• The FAT32 filesystem used on SD cards has a technical limit of 4gb per file regardless of EU taxation or video codec. More mature, professionally-oriented video systems are better at starting a new file once the 4gb limit has been reached.
• Overheating would be another limitation of recording time, but that would only come up situationally.

Most consumer video codecs are not constant bitrate, but adapt to the amount of detail in the scene (more detail is harder to compress and requires bigger files) so it would be impossible to say how long it will take before a given video bumps into the 4GB limit without additional information, and that's information only the camera itself has.

Big companies like Olympus are doing cost-benefit analysis on everything, and most of the time they decide it's not worth it to release different firmware versions for different regions. AFAIK, only Panasonic, and possibly Sony, both consumer electronics giants that have been deeply rooted in video for decades, have decided it's worth it to do anything along the lines of concurrently releasing both a US model of a camera that records NTSC frame rates and no limit of recording time, and an international model that records PAL frame rates and EU's recording time limit.

2. can I remove the "software cap" on the maximum length of the video recording.

No. If you could, it would be defined as a camera capable of recording 30 minutes or more at a stretch, the EU would be collecting a duty on the camera and it would cost more in the EU anyway.

Ironically, video cameras aren't manufactured inside the EU, so the tariff doesn't make a lot of sense. It's not protecting any EU industry. Yet, still cameras are manufactured inside the EU, and no tariff is levied against foreign still cameras. But it is what it is.

They only answered about the shutter count rating... which is not tested, but PEN line cameras will have somewhere around 50,000 ~ 100,000 shutter counts before they die.

By the way, I don't think that estimate is a very good one... 50k to 100k. It sounds like he pulled out that number randomly... not very technical answer from the tech support.

That's actually a pretty typical estimate for consumer grade focal plane shutters. With a high-precision high-energy component like that, that could wear differently depending on manufacturing tolerances, dust inside the camera body, and even humidity levels, it's not possible to say how long it's rated to last outside of a pretty broad range.