jancology.com

After using my Coolpix 5700 for almost a year now, I decided on having the firmware upgraded to version 1.1. I didn’t do this before because I thought of the “Don’t fix what isn’t broken” paradigm. And besides that, two of the three fixes advertised were about RAW shootings, which I don’t use at all because of its slowness of recording to flash. However I found some discussion on the net that the update included some enhancements for low light focussing and automatic flash compensation for near subjects so I though giving it a try.

The firmware upgrade is very easy and I don’t know why lots of people seem to have difficulties with it. It involves the following steps (on windows):

1. Download the firmware
2. Extract the zip file.
3. Put the Compact Flash card in your reader and clear all files and directories from it. Of course you first save things you wanne keep.
4. Copy the firmware directory to the card. This direcotry includesa single file firmware.bin. On the card we now have \firmware\firmware.bin.
5. Insert a fresh and full batery in the camera. If the batary is not fresh you could end up with a failure in installing the new firware which could corrupt the camera software and make it useless.
6. Place the card back in the camera.
7. Change the camera mode to playback mode [>].
8. Open the display and turn the camera on. The system now shows you the current firmware version and the firmware update version and asks you to confirm the update. Select yes to continue. It takes a minute or so to do the upgrade, the camera shows no progression indicator and will show a gray screen with “O K COMPLETE” when its ready.
9. Turn the camera off and change its mode to Shooting mode and turn it back on again. I now saw a flash of the upgrade screen but then immediately turned to the ‘lens’ view
10. Now go the the menu and (re)format the card to (get rid of the firmware bin and its directory) be able to store images on it.

I had no problems whatsoever in this upgrade and everything works as expected. The custom settings 1-3 are lost and you have to reconfigure these. I also cannot confirm that the focussing under low light/low contrast conditions is any better then before. Also I’m not sure if the flash compensation is different. It looks slightly better but that may be because I expect it to be better.

Note that the current actual firmware version can be easily identified by turning the camera off, change it to playback mode, press the menu button and turn the camera on. Instead of showing you the images on the card, it will show you the actual firmware version.