OM Unlocked: The Practical Olympus & OM System Settings Guide

Every Olympus and OM System manual tells you what a setting does. Almost none of them tell you why you’d actually reach for it, or what it quietly breaks elsewhere in the menu the moment you turn it on. That gap is where OM Unlocked lives — a new practical guide built from thirteen official manuals, cross-checked against real shooting experience, and organised so you can find the answer mid-shoot rather than three menus deep.

It isn’t a summary of the manual. Where the manual says “Custom Mode Save Settings: select ON or OFF to determine whether changes made during shooting are retained,” OM Unlocked says that if this is OFF — the default — every tweak you make mid-shoot vanishes the moment you switch modes, and that’s exactly why your camera keeps “resetting.” Every one of its 91 tips follows that same logic: not what the control does, but when to use it and what to watch out for.

What’s Inside

Eight modules, each built to work across the whole current Olympus and OM System range, with every tip tagged for the cameras it’s confirmed on:

Controls & Customisation — Fn buttons, Custom Modes, My Menu, and the Super Control Panel shortcuts that actually save time.

Focus & Subject Detection — 121 points vs. Quad Pixel AF, subject detection across three generations, and Starry Sky AF.

Art Filters, Picture Mode & Colour — the Creative Dial’s ten-year history, Colour and Monochrome Profile Control, and the filters that never change.

Computational Photography — Live Composite, High Res Shot, Focus Stacking, Pro Capture, Live ND and GND — this brand’s biggest advantage, explained.

Action & Speed — Pro Capture, buffer depths, card-slot asymmetries, and the shutter-type gotchas that cost you a shot.

Battery, Cards & Weatherproofing — five incompatible battery families, card-slot counts that ignore price, and real weatherproofing ratings.

Video Essentials — log profiles hidden in the wrong menu, RAW HDMI output, and the feature that quietly disappeared.

Troubleshooting — the errors that look like a fault and aren’t, and the ones that are, with a fix attached.

On top of the eight modules, five appendices break things down camera-group by camera-group — Stacked/Quad Pixel Generation, 20MP Non-Stacked Generation, Entry 16MP Generation, and standalone chapters for the E-M1X and the OM-3 ASTRO — with a cheat sheet for every single body and a full Olympus/OM System glossary at the back.

Thirteen Cameras, Fully Covered

OM Unlocked is written for the OM-1, OM-1 Mark II, OM-3, OM-3 ASTRO, E-M1 Mark III, E-M1X, E-M5 Mark III, E-M10 Mark III, E-M10 Mark IV, PEN E-P7, PEN E-PL10, PEN-F and OM-5 Mark II. It spans three sensor and processor generations, from the 2016 PEN-F to the 2025 OM-3 ASTRO, but the menu logic, Custom Mode mechanics and shooting fundamentals carry over across the wider range too — every tip is tagged with exactly which cameras it’s confirmed on, so you always know where you stand.

128 pages in total, designed as a single PDF you’ll actually read on your phone mid-shoot, not just a file left on a shelf.

Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe today and get OM Unlocked free, along with everything else Premium includes.

OM Unlocked is available now, with an early-bird price for a limited time.