Is your camera running the latest firmware?

With the spring plants starting to appear from the depths of the earth and the days getting longer it’s time for photographers to check over their kit for this years photo activities. Whilst practical things like sensor and lens cleaning is always a good task to undertake regularly one that often gets overlooked is to maintain the firmware of your camera.

Canon often introduces new firmware versions for it’s cameras to provide support for new features or functions and sometimes to correct some things. One thing is that the text on the LCD menu might need a little ‘clarification’ particularly the strings in languages that are not English or Japanese. Recently I’ve had a photographer ask about some odd looking results and worryingly some trouble with processing RAW images from his EOS 40D in Adobe Lightroom. It turns out that his camera was still running a very old version of the firmware and firmware update 1.0.5 for the EOS 40D firmware had included a fix, the nootes said…

‘Corrects a phenomenon that RAW images cannot open by competitors’ applications.’

You can update the firmware by yourself, it’s not difficult and the details and instructions are clear on the Canon EOS DIGITAL site. However please heed the warnings in Canon’s instructions, as a botched firmware update almost surely means a trip to Canon’s service center and maybe a costly repair.

If you are going to do a firmware update yourself here’s a few tips for the job.

• Use a fully charged battery in the camera
• Use a memory card that is 2GB capacity of less, particularly in older cameras
• Remove the lens and put the regular body cap on the camera
• Once the update process is running don’t press any buttons or move dials

To determine the firmware version in your camera go to the menu and you will find the firmware version displayed in one of the yellow menu tabs.

The current latest versions of firmware you can download from Canon are listed below, click on the camera name to go to the direct download links. You will find that Canon only makes firmware for EOS available from the main www.canon.com site, all the Canon country sites link to this one place so make sure you only get your firmware from here. Most recent firmware updates since March 2011 have been provided from the Canon Europe and Canon USA websites, not from the main www.canon.com site. Some of the latest download links below will take you to the Canon Europe site to download the firmware.

• EOS 1000D / Rebel XS – 1.0.7
• EOS 1100D / Rebel T3 – 1.0.5
• EOS 300D / Rebel – 1.1.1
• EOS 350D / Rebel XT – 1.0.3
• EOS 400D / Rebel XTi – 1.1.1
• EOS 450D / Rebel XSi – 1.1.0
• EOS 500D / Rebel T1i – 1.1.0
• EOS 550D / Rebel T2i – 1.0.9
• EOS 600D / Rebel T3i – 1.0.1
• EOS D30 – 1.0.3
• EOS D60 – 1.0.4
• EOS 10D – 2.0.1
• EOS 20D – 2.0.3
• EOS 30D – 1.0.6
• EOS 40D – 1.1.1
• EOS 50D – 1.0.8
• EOS 60D – 1.1.0
• EOS 7D – 1.2.5
• EOS 5D – 1.1.1
• EOS 5D Mark II – 2.1.2
• EOS 5D Mark III
• EOS-1D – 1.4.0
• EOS-1Ds – 1.0.3
• EOS-1D Mark II – 1.2.6
• EOS-1Ds Mark II – 1.1.6
• EOS-1D Mark II N – 1.1.2
• EOS-1D Mark III – 1.3.0
• EOS-1Ds Mark III – 1.2.0
• EOS-1D Mark IV – 1.1.1
• EOS-1D X

If you have any information about updates to firmware please put a note in the comments, thanks.