Battery performance on my OM-D EM-1 & supplied manual

Banger wrote:

Well, I find the Olympus batteries significantly better than the cheap clones available from China, and achieving 400+ shots with the E-M1 + 12-40mm easy (with the Olympus battery). But I always turn the off the camera after shooting and rarely let it go to 'sleep', I also notice the battery life drops when using older 4/3 lenses.

A word of caution, I have clone batteries for my E-P3 and E-M1 and one of the clones left in my E-P3 for a few weeks without use, swelled up to the point where I could not remove it with some serious 'engineering' effort. Fortunately it worked out OK. As a result I will never leave a clone battery in either of my cameras if they are not in use.

Suggest you also consider buying the 'grip', very nice product and gives you an extra battery if your shooting requirements need it.

Rob

Hi Rob, Iv'e read about the problems with some cloned batteries swelling up on this forum recently, mine seem to be just fine at the moment, (will keep a check) however, regarding your other point I had considered the battery grip but the extra weight and overall size puts me off, as one of the reasons I decided to buy the Olympus was because of its overall footprint and therefore a grip would just mean it was as large as the Pentax with it's battery power pack attached.

I've had my EM5 for more than 2 years now and I can easily pull off 400-500 shots per battery (I only ever had one spare battery). The trick is to use the LCD only when necessary and turn it off when i know i won't be shooting right away. I normally put the LCD to display the menus (as mentioned in a previous response here) although I'm not sure if that helps save battery life. Also, if you leave it on and hang it on your neck or shoulder the EVF will still activate when the sensor gets covered...this uses up battery as well.

the English Olympus service/office centre is based in Ireland and I don't know if they would be able to send a printed manual if asked.

My first thoughts about the manual were like yours - cheapskates for leaving out the printed edition.

But really the electronic edition is far more useful as it can be searched for specific words/phrases and bookmarked where ever you like.

Just pop it on your iPad or even a phone, it's always there for reference that way and weighs nothing.

It's a pity that Olympus didn't take a bit of extra time to make the pdf manual a bit more user friendly like Panasonic did - the Panny pdf manuals are directly navigable via the page index, just tap a page in the index and up it comes. The Oly ones don't have that feature (AFAIK)

Also if you really want to find out *everything* the EM1 is capable of then you need more than the Olympus user manual which is useless for anything more than basic instruction.

The Gary L Friedman book is totally brilliant and a small amount of money well spent to guide you around the EM1 totally. Gary has also issued a free electronic update to his book to cover the V2 firmware update, another advantage of electronic publications...

As far as battery usage my EM1 does quite well. I have 2 extra genuine Oly batteries and even on a heavy day's use I don't think I have ever even fully used up the 1st spare, meaning the 2nd one has never been used so far...

I do keep the LCD switched off most of the time as I nearly always use the EVF.

caloymiranda wrote:

I've had my EM5 for more than 2 years now and I can easily pull off 400-500 shots per battery (I only ever had one spare battery). The trick is to use the LCD only when necessary and turn it off when i know i won't be shooting right away. I normally put the LCD to display the menus (as mentioned in a previous response here) although I'm not sure if that helps save battery life. Also, if you leave it on and hang it on your neck or shoulder the EVF will still activate when the sensor gets covered...this uses up battery as well.

Thanks caloymiranda, my thoughts exactly regarding the auto eyepiece shutoff sensor, I use a wrist strap and as I previously mentioned I will have to keep an eye (sorry no pun intended) on it keeping the camera awake after my set time of 4 minutes, infact, I had noticed it on one occasion staying on but as it subsequently turned off I didn't think to take any more notice.

SidSnot wrote:

the English Olympus service/office centre is based in Ireland and I don't know if they would be able to send a printed manual if asked.

My first thoughts about the manual were like yours - cheapskates for leaving out the printed edition.

But really the electronic edition is far more useful as it can be searched for specific words/phrases and bookmarked where ever you like.

Just pop it on your iPad or even a phone, it's always there for reference that way and weighs nothing.

It's a pity that Olympus didn't take a bit of extra time to make the pdf manual a bit more user friendly like Panasonic did - the Panny pdf manuals are directly navigable via the page index, just tap a page in the index and up it comes. The Oly ones don't have that feature (AFAIK)

Also if you really want to find out *everything* the EM1 is capable of then you need more than the Olympus user manual which is useless for anything more than basic instruction.

The Gary L Friedman book is totally brilliant and a small amount of money well spent to guide you around the EM1 totally. Gary has also issued a free electronic update to his book to cover the V2 firmware update, another advantage of electronic publications...

As far as battery usage my EM1 does quite well. I have 2 extra genuine Oly batteries and even on a heavy day's use I don't think I have ever even fully used up the 1st spare, meaning the 2nd one has never been used so far...

I do keep the LCD switched off most of the time as I nearly always use the EVF.

Hi Sidsnot, I have the Gary L Frieman book but unfortunately my tablet Kindle version has not updated to the V2 firmware, I think I should have downloaded it directly from his own web site. Amazon are a little behind with the update it would seem..... again bummer, however, it's an excellent book but it can be a bit involved at times especially as a new Olympus owner. I especially like the downloadable how to setup, configure, and customize the camera link at the end of his book provided by John Foster.

paul spicer wrote:

I'll answer without reading everyone else. Life is short so forgive me.

I love my OM-D EM-1, it's excellent controls, it's construction, it's viewfinder, however, I absolutely dislike the pathetic battery performance. I noticed in these forums some owners managing to achieve well above 350 shots and even one I believe had around 700 per charge, how do they do that ?, is the camera in Hi frame rate to achieve this. I however, never seem to manage much more than around 150 frames at its best, also, I purchased three other non Olympus batteries (EXpro's) which work absolutely fine for the price (paid £10 each) but these are only a little less in performance than the Olympus original, which in itself is in my opinion is very, very, poor.

What are your views on this subject ?

I bought this camera with all these functions, you know, and I want to use any of them as needed without any regard to battery consumption. So I bought the battery grip (aka 'PBH' in Olympus lingo) and set it up so the battery in it would be spent in priority. This way, when it runs out the battery in the camera takes the relay and I never have to stop shooting to change the battery but can wait for the next opportunity. This way I've had runs of 2000+ shots before I had to change the battery in the camera. The PBH itself make the camera lighter by effect of better ergonomy IMHO.

This afternoon I shot some 300 photos on one battery. Sometimes I get only 150 but that is pretty much the minimum. I shoot only RAW, maybe it helps saving energy; I never delete in camera and I very little review, both activities are power hungry but I would use these function if they were useful to me; I probably do other things that require more juice or save some but I won't dance around and deprive myself of what I paid for.

One precaution to take though: always fill up you batteries right before using them. I found that they lose quite a bit of power in just a few days of storage.

, I should mention that I have a Sony NEX 6 and 5n, both are significantly better in the battery compartment, including additional EXpro's I have as spares.

My only other gripe is why can't Olympus supply a decent printed manual with this Professional camera, my Pentax K5 has a fantastic manual, infact the best I ever had with any camera throughout my period of camera ownership, way before digital was around.

The most recent manual can be bought direct from Olympus for 10$. It comes by mail fairly fast. For the money it could be included with the camera. OTOH mine was firmware 1.1 and became outdated by firmware 2.0+.

Have fun.

paul spicer wrote:

I love my OM-D EM-1, it's excellent controls, it's construction, it's viewfinder, however, I absolutely dislike the pathetic battery performance. I noticed in these forums some owners managing to achieve well above 350 shots and even one I believe had around 700 per charge, how do they do that ?, is the camera in Hi frame rate to achieve this. I however, never seem to manage much more than around 150 frames at its best, also, I purchased three other non Olympus batteries (EXpro's) which work absolutely fine for the price (paid £10 each) but these are only a little less in performance than the Olympus original, which in itself is in my opinion is very, very, poor.

As a number of other users have pointed out, battery endurance varies greatly depending on the rate at which shots are taken. In other words, collecting 300 shots over several days will result in a battery with lower charge than collecting the same 300 shots over a 4 hour period.

With this in mind, over the last year I have logged 18.9K shots on two E-M1's, both equipped with HLD-7's. During this period, I have utilized eight different BLN-1's with date codes from 2012-03 through 2013-09.

In some of my usage I take a week to run a battery down. In other cases I have depleted a battery in 3-4 hours.

Avg endurance of all eight Olympus BLN-1's during this period is 440 shots / charge.

My sentiments exactly. Big, bulky, paper printed manuals are really becoming dinosaurs anyway. The last system I got a big manual with was the GH2 but my Nikon D5300 was just like my new EM-1, a very slim manual and then the big one on the website or on the DVD and people are complaining about that as well. I prefer having the PDF version on all my devices, easy to bookmark, and always around without taking up any space in the camera bag, while not cutting down so many trees.

Hi Paul,

I had read on the Amazon reviews that if you just email Gary Friedman, he will email you a link to download both the v.2 firmware and also the PDF version of his book. I did that and he replied within one day with links to both. The Kindle format is horrible but the PDF version is great and I open it in iBooks on my iPad and then I can bookmark pages.

pcgould wrote:

Hi Paul,

I had read on the Amazon reviews that if you just email Gary Friedman, he will email you a link to download both the v.2 firmware and also the PDF version of his book. I did that and he replied within one day with links to both. The Kindle format is horrible but the PDF version is great and I open it in iBooks on my iPad and then I can bookmark pages.

Hi pcgould

I was waiting for Amazon to update the kindle version but it hasn't happened so far so l will defiantly email Gary to see if he will send me a PDF Version with the V.2 firmware upgrade. Many thanks that was very useful.

Thanks Airmel, that was quite something to keep those stat's on your battery usage, very intresting, I've gained quite a few tips here to increase my cameras battery life, so I will be putting some of them to good use during the next couple of months and hope I can achieve as many frames as your average.

LearningForeverIHope wrote:

One precaution to take though: always fill up you batteries right before using them. I found that they lose quite a bit of power in just a few days of storage.

Thanks, that's a  good tip, I will check my spate batteries to see if I have the same problem, that could make a lot of difference with my lack of overall power.