Photography Rulez: Firmware Upgrade 1.31

Friday, August 27, 2010

Firmware Upgrade 1.31

I finally got around to upgrading my K10D firmware to 1.31. I got a nice surprise after I did!

I was messing around with some scripting for the K10D that I found (no I couldn't get it to work - I'm guessing it's because I'm in debug mode) and had the Tamron 75-300LD macro lens on and it was struggling with auto focus (going from one extreme to the other) in the dim light in the living room. After I got board with the scripting I decided I would try the new firmware.

I downloaded the self-extracting exe file and copied the bin file to my SD card.

I held down the menu button and applied power to the camera.

The install process went without problems so I formatted the SD card and restarted the camera with the menu button pressed to verify the firmware upgraded. Yup, 1.31.00.19 showed up on the display.

The camera still was in debug mode so upgrading the firmware didn't remove debug mode. That's kind of cool except I was hoping it would turn off debug mode since I have misplaced my USB cable. :/

Oh well, it's nice to know that debug still works with the latest firmware.

On to my nice surprise. I was testing out the camera to make sure it was all still working after I had messed with it so much earlier with scripting and testing (my auto focus points were jacked) and I noticed that instead of the 75-300 going from one focus extreme to the other to find an object it snapped right into focus. Wow, was it a coincidence?

I purposely close focused on my subject and pressed the shutter button half way. Where before the Tamron would go completely to focus extreme before focusing in the opposite direction and finally snapping on the subject, it now did about 3 quick (comparatively) short jumps into focus. I tried it a couple of times in dim light and in brighter light and the focusing definitely was shorter because it did not travel to the focus extremes. The focusing still went awry in very low light but that is to be expected.

So along with a few others I think Pentax sneaked in some focus code into the latest firmware.

1 comment:

Boris Liberman said...: Thanks to your post, I downloaded and upgraded firmware of my daughter's K10D... We will see how it fares...; August 28, 2010 at 11:32 PM

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About the Blog

If you like this blog or found some useful information in it please consider making your next Amazon purchase through this site by clicking this link or other links found on the blog.

A blog mostly about the Pentax K10D camera but a lot of the information can be used for other camera systems with little adaptation.

The blog is of course chronological so use the archive pulldown menu (sidebar above), which has the oldest posts listed first, and work your way down it to get to see all of the content on the site.

Alternatively you can see the complete Internal K10D Links menu. You can read any of the K10D specific article that interest you.

Another way to navigate is to use the new Camera Features Site map. The camera features are broken down into a navigational menu. This is the best mode if you either know exactly what you want to look at or to see all the features of the camera at a glance. It is a work in progress but many of the features have links to site content already.

Also you can navigate by Site Labels list the articles according to the article labels.

And if that doesn't tickle your fancy Start at the beginning and follow the K10D links to the next article in the series at the bottom.

For non-K10D photography related stuff see my Internal Related links.

This is my first ever blog. If you know of better ways to present the material or to improve the site overall leave feedback or comments. Currently the site is slow enough I can respond to every comment I get.

Thanks.