Olympus E520 - Continuous Shooting Problem

[Fen]

Hi Folks,

A friend of mine has a Olympus E520 that is causing a problem.

She wanted to get some snow scenes so she put the camera in scene mode for 2beach/snow shots" and for some reason it also goes into "Continuous Shooting". To quote her

it just reels off shot after shot so long as I keep the shutter release button depressed. It doesn't happen on any other settings other than the beach/snow scene preset mode. Although I know how to change the shooting mode, the option for single shots isn't available at all on the menu - it's just "greyed out" so I can't select it.

Regarding the focus light, although the AF confirmation mark doesn't light up as normal, it does appear to be focussing, and gives me a cute little bleep to tell me when it's ready!

Anyone have any ideas?

Many thanks

[john2]

Hi Fen,
I have just tried this on my E520, and it does the same. Hard to see the reason for it, but it just looks like a quirk in the programming.It may be some consolation to your friend to know that her camera is not faulty. I hadn't realised this, as I have never used the scene modes. The instruction manual, of course, gives no information
John

[Fen]

Many thanks John. I'll let her know

[john2]

Thinking a bit more about this, I can only think that the Olympus team think that users taking pictures of snow or beach scenes are quite likely to be photographing winter sports such as skiing or sledging, or beach games, children playing, etc.. It will cause problems trying to focus on an off centre subject though. It could almost have done with two modes, one for action and one for static scenes. Although individual focus points cannot be selected anyway in scene modes. The only answer seems to be to use the more manual modes, and either give a bit of positive exposure compensation or use the spot hilight reading from the snow.
John

[RogerMac]

Couple of points, slightly off topic I am afraid:

1. I always leave my camera on continuous shooting - occasionally I take some extra images which can be easily deleted but if I suddenly see someting that needs a series I will not miss it by diving into menus etc. So I think that Oly may have got that one right.

2. Scene modes can be very usefull but are always rather inflexible,and are probably best used as an instruction tool. For example I was doing a lot of old documents recently, the scene mode for newsprint was fine except that I wanted to set a few seconds anti shock whilst I got my hand well away from the camera, but of course anti-shock was greyed out - so I made a note of the exposure recommendations and set these up manually, and was then able to use anti-shock as well.

Just my 2d worth

Roger

[john2]

I'm sorry, I was wrong to say in my earlier post that you can't select individual focus points in scene modes. You can, of course, using the dedicated button, although since they are so close together it isn't a great help. Incidentally, my E500 behaves exactly the same as the E520 in the Snow scene mode.John