Five OM-D cameras get firmware update to support the upcoming M.Zuiko 90mm F3.5 Macro IS Pro lens

I purchased my em5 mII from KEH in Atlanta and they did not recognize that place either, I emailed OLY Support. This happened a couple weeks ago, do not know the resolution. I have all the paperwork and original box and documents.........

You're playing the same game, though; you've just defined your own rules.

If you're going to use the words "field of view" and say it's "equivalent to," then it's fair to call it a "4:1 *equivalent*" macro.

You might as well say, "with depth-of-field equivalent to an ƒ/7 lens," too. That's important in a macro.

I think that thinking people who really understand know that "equivalency" is situational. You can "fix" any equivalency problem if you know how. You can plan any shoot around equivalency benefits, too.

It all comes down to knowing your tools, no?

@RSTP14: Field of view in macro photography follows magnification plus negative/sensor size rather than focal length plus negative/sensor size. But no matter which, negative/sensor size is relevant in both cases, and specifying an 'equivalent' figure to make it comparable across formats is justified in each of them just as much as in the other.

Like focal length, in practice magnification is totally meaningless without knowing and telling the negative/sensor size. After all, we want to know the exact size of the area captured, not some number which has no meaning without also knowing the negative/sensor size. Equivalent magnification is exactly the thing that helps.

"magnification is totally meaningless without knowing and telling the negative/sensor size"

Well, to be pedantic, the term-of-art "reproduction ratio" is relative to the final screen or print size, no? So you can claim that jumping spider that fills the screen came from a "100:1" macro lens? :-)

Of course it's perfectly valid to note the magnification ratio of a subject on a print, but that's not a property of the recording gear. What a macro photographer wants to know about the recording gear is how small an area it can capture, filling the frame. (And then they know everything about their options regarding print size, too.) The magnification factor between life size and film/sensor plane image size is a technical irrelevancy that's meaningless without knowing the sensor size.

"Why don't you go straight to claim that 10 Mpix sensor makes the 100 mm lens equivalent to 50 mm"—I can't speak for @Jan Steinman, but I don't because it doesn't. Focal length equivalence is about comparing field of view between formats, nothing else.

Most importantly, though, sensor resolution is not a property of the format, so it does not change anything for format equivalency. Be aware that actually, at this point, the smallest sensors have the highest resolutions (we now have 200 MP smartphone sensors). There is no technical reason why any format could not get any sensor resolution at this point.

That said, sensor resolution (as long as it is sensibly resolved by the corresponding lens) of course does add another aspect to comparisons. While it does not change *equivalent* magnification, it can change the *effective* magnification if we look at the printed or viewed results. Just as sensor resolution can change the *effective reach* of a telephoto lens.

@Fearless "Which firmware updates have previously caused problems?"

I recall that Olympus had one firmware, maybe the 3.x series for E-M1 in 2014-15, it withdrew in a same day after release. It caused bricking the body.
https://lightsnowdev.com/Olympus/

Rename the firmware

Create a folder called "DCOLYMP" on your SD card.
Rename the downloaded file to E1259999.BIN and put it inside this folder.

The whole process will take a about 1-2 minutes.

1) Make sure your camera is turned off at first. Now insert the SD Card with the firmware file.

2) Start the camera while pushing the "OK" button.
3) The screen will be black and the orange front LED will turn on.
4) DO NOT TURN THE CAMERA OFF WHILE THE LED IS ON.
5) Wait until it blinks rapidly.

This means the process is finished. You can now restart the camera like you would do normaly.

It seems obvious the firmware change is to provide focus stacking for the new lens. So if your camera doesn't have the focus stack feature, there is no way to update a feature your camera does not have.

my post was a joke." five omd camera models" would have worked better.

Olympus added focus stacking functionality to E-M1 in 4.0 firmware, 2016-04-02.

That model didn't receive support for this, likely because it is just so old from 2013 and likely belongs outside the contract to Olympus only.

Its already hard enough to keep lighter macro lenses steady.

@Djehuty: Heavier gear is not detrimental to steadiness, on the contrary, it improves it. Except for when it becomes so heavy that it makes you shake ;-)

2.0? For macro absolutely unnecessary.

with Macro I use f 9-22. Heavy high speed lenses are a nuisance to me -I need DOF and sharpness

@Weia @Miron09 That's why the thread starter said "doubling up as a portrait lens", not "for macro". But a large aperture also helps in nailing focus in macro photography, no matter what the selected F-stop is.

Still I suppose that 90mm f/3.5 lens will be a good compromise between size/weight and aperture.

"… why can't they make a 90mm macro that is F2.0?"

They did. I have *two!*

But it doesn't do focus stacking. (It doesn't even auto-focus.)

https://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/hardwares/classics/olympusom1n2/shared/zuiko/htmls/macrozuikoE.htm

@Hubertus

Only you understood what I said. The rest are just so narrow & closed in their minds that a macro lens can only be used for macro purpose only and nothing else. Geez... and this is suppose to be a creative hobby.

For a modern digital lens, at 90mm F2.0 doesn't mean it must be heavy. Jan Steinman link shows an old film 90mm F2 lens at 550g. It's not even heavier than a OM-1 or a G9 body.

Unfortunately, many kinds of lenses, even mirrorless designs which potentially profit from the shorter flange focal distance, need to be much more complex and therefore bigger and heavier than those corresponding SLR lenses from the nineteen-seventies. For one, demands with regard to image quality (perfect across-the-frame resolution and sharpness on high resolution sensors, if possible already wide open, buttery smooth bokeh etc.) have increased, and then mirrorless AF requires a much more complex design with internal focusing and an extremely size and weight reduced focusing group to be quick enough. A focusing mechanism that would have to move a whole lens barrel like in the OM 90mm f/2 just wouldn't work. As much as I hate the fact, a compact lens like the OM 90mm f/2 is not possible anymore for modern mirrorless cameras. (It might be, of course, if it simply would do without AF, like the Laowa 50mm f/2.8 that at least does retain contacts and automatic aperture...)

[cont'd]

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Of course I do see where you come from; I had similar gripes with the Olympus 60mm f/2.8 Macro after I had been using the Four Thirds 50mm f/2 for many years. The 50mm used to make a decent portrait lens, too (despite its heavy longitudinal CA which were it's only fault), whereas the 60mm f/2.8 doesn't. Also, the 50mm used to be good for landscape, whereas the 60mm's resolution deteriorates at longer focusing distances...

@silentstorm

Cost and market expectations.

It's quite easy to make a product that does one thing very well. Or to make a product that does a lot of things poorly (or at best acceptably). It's very hard and expensive to make a product that does multiple things very well and at the same time meets actual user expectations.

Look at it this way. There's a group of people who want a 2:1 telephoto macro lens. And a group of people who want a fastish telephoto prime. And there is a small subset of those two groups that want both. At first glance, a 90mm f/2 looks nice to all of them, right?

But then the reality hits. Would the macro folks want to pay twice to get 1.5 stop of light which they don't need and deal with a much larger and heavier lens? And would the "low light" folks want to pay twice as much to get unnecessary 2:1 macro and deal with a larger and heavier lens?

In short, there might be some overlap in user needs, but not in the design goals for those two types of lenses.

As I understand in a macro lens you want to minimize the effect of diffraction at smallest apertures, hence designed to have peak sharpness closer to F8 and also optimized for focus at close distance (although modern designs have pretty much addressed the lack of sharpness at infinity the old macro lenses use to suffer from). At F2 the sharpness could be suboptimal I would imagine.

@Jan Steinman: in theory, that's true what you say about diffraction, but in practice I've seen lenses deteriorate earlier than others when stopping down to the same F-stops (which can also often be observed when looking for it in typical lens tests and their resolution diagrams).

Specifically, when I bought the Olympus 60mm f/2.8, even though it really is more of a macro-optimized lens than the FT 50mm f/2, my first impression was that at f/11 it was already nearly as soft as the 50mm f/2 was at something like f/14. I never researched into it further, though, I just avoided stopping down beyond f/8 if possible.

Also, if you have two OM 90mm f/2 samples, why don't you give me one of them? ;-)

It's working perfectly on my M1 Mac. You cal also use OM Image Share on your smartphone to update the firmware.

There's nothing simpler than pressing "update firmware" button on your phone. This is how it worked last time I updated my OM-1. I opened their app on my phone, went into "check for updates" and when it told me there's a new version, I tapped on a button to install it. Then it installed it and that was it.

Boring story, I know.

Your camera is not connected to the internet, actually.
The Olympus program downloads the firmware, then pushes it to the camera. So no direct link between the internet and the camera...

Karroly OK, but that's splitting a hair. There should be no need to connect a camera to an internet attached computer.
A download to a camera memory card then installed for the update is more convenient and, I would argue, safer for a camera that is worth more than a computer.

I don't agree with that, what will happen in the SD card is corrupted?
Just use your smartphone, it's the easiest way and you can update it on the go.

This guy bricked his OM-1 using the official, supported Workspace method of updating the firmware:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66799328

Karroly: If the SD card method is used by Olympus/OMDS technicians then why is it not a document, supported way? My understanding is that the firmware files are hidden on the internet, but some people have snooped around and found them. Somehow they figured out the button combinations, etc. that are necessary to use the SD card method, but it is all unsupported and ad hoc. If it truly is used internally by the corporation then why are they hiding it?

"much more reliable than my OM-1"

Interesting. I have both, and find them equally reliable.

OM-1 and OM-5 can be updated through the mobile app.

As an RF engineer, I tremble at the thought of updating via WiFi or Bluetooth.

@Jan Steinman the camera verifies the checksum of the firmware file before starting the update.

@Jan Steinman the problems with "bricked" cameras are most commonly caused during the update process, not the downloading or transferring of the file. The most common causes are people getting impatient and switching the camera off early, the battery dying during the process, and very, very rarely by pushing buttons or moving dials during a small window of time in the process when that can cause problems.