Broken Olympus lens! :( Any suggestions?

[locostbob]

Hey up...

Well a slightly frustrating day the the super bikes at oulton park.... my continuous auto focus decided to start playing up! BSB and manual focus just doesn't work - there too fast!!

I have an Olympus E1 body and 50 - 200 F2.8 ED lens. On single focus it does focus but takes a little time, on continuous focus its all over the place and just wont focus (manual is fine).

The lens is 2nd hand to me and has always had an intermittent problem focusing when at 200mm, sometime just wouldn't focus, so reduce down to 150mm and back to 200mm and all is fine for a few hours!

I dont know much about fixing gear and the internal workings of a camera! Just wondering of there anything i can try cleaning (focus sensor or similar??) or doing or is it off get fixed?

Could anybody recommend the best place to send to get fixed? Im in Chester / south manchester area and was thinking of London Camera Exchange as i have always had good service off them

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!!

Many thanks

bob

 

[who?]

Ring olympus and ask I guess.

I have seen a couple of reports of this lens failing - screws coming undone internally which results in movement and I think in one case the lens coming apart.

Have a search over on e-system user.

 

[locostbob]

Cheers Who?...

I have called Olympus... i spoke to a nice lady (with very bad English!) and have done some of their system re-sets etc... took a while as i think they have forgotten about the E1!

also cleaned the contact terminals which seams to have made the most improvement... just been out at all seams working again! Yeah!

cheers

bob

 

[Chevvyf1]

Thanks for this - its right handy to know ... I have this lens and it does not focus at 200 well often ! How did you reset ? please

 

[locostbob]

Hi Chevvyf1,

for the E1 go into the camera set up menu and there is a setting saying lens reset, set this to yes. When you turn the camera off it resets the lens back to a defult setting (i think winds the focus back to close up). I already had this set as yes is the defalut setting. I suspect there will be a similar setting on other olympus cameras. If not a quick call to olympus technical will tell you how to do it on your camera..

the lens reset didnt fix my problem, a good clean of the camera and lens contacts made the biggest improvement. With hindsight, it was also a very low light day which didnt help matters as the E1 is known to struggle to focus in low light...

My lens is still very hit or miss at 200mm... i just live with it but dont use 200mm all that often

hope this helps!

bob