Firmware Friday: Ricoh GR III, Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro G2 / accessories, Canon Speedlite EL-100 updated

 

 

This week's Firmware Friday roundup is more a story of imaging accessories than of camera firmware per se, but we've still a fair bit to discuss. As well as updates for the Ricoh GR III large-sensor compact, and for Blackmagic's professionally-targeted URSA Mini Pro G2 video camera, we've also news of new firmware for one of Canon's Speedlite strobes, and several of Blackmagic's viewfinder and fiber converter accessories.

Let's roll up our sleeves and get right down to what's new!

Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro G2, URSA Viewfinder, URSA Studio Viewfinder, Camera Fiber Converter and Studio Fiber Converter

Hitting the list in alphabetical order as we usually do, we'll kick things off with Blackmagic Design, which conveniently also has the bulk of the news this week. With its Blackmagic Camera 6.4 software (download here for Windows or here for Mac OS), the company has updated one camera, two viewfinder accessories, and two fiber converter accessories.

The URSA Mini Pro G2 gets 11 changes as follows:

1. Retain jam synced timecode after power cycle.

2. Improved jam sync timecode accuracy after playback.

3. Improved HDR SDI metadata support.

4. Improved pixel recalibration.

5. Improved door LED behaviour on low battery.

6. Improved clip playback for renamed clips.

7. Improved EF lens metadata support.

8. Fixed still capture to slow media cards.

9. Fixed audio playback at 23.98, 29.97 and 59.94 fps.

10. Fixed XLR gains resetting after power cycle.

11. General performance and stability improvements.

The URSA Studio Viewfinder accessory gets two tweaks, as follows:

1. Improved support for URSA Mini Pro G2 built in LUTs.

2. Improved overlays when used with URSA Mini Pro G2.

The URSA Viewfinder accessory, meanwhile, gets both of these and the following:

3. Improved UI elements for drop frame timecode.

4. Improved UI elements for URSA Mini Pro G2 USB-C record.

5. Improved iris readout.

6. Fixed record dot bug with status display.

Finally, there are seven changes for both the Studio Fiber Converter and Camera Fiber Converter accessories:

1. Add menu to Studio Fiber Converter.

2. Add audio meters to Studio Fiber Converter.

3. Add ability to adjust Camera Fiber Converter XLR input levels.

4. Add ability to use program audio feed as source from DB25 connector.

5. Add ability to adjust levels for headset gain and microphone gain.

6. Add PTZ de-embedding from ATEM via SDI Camera Control Protocol.

7. Add ability to configure talkback for production & engineering channels.

Canon Speedlite EL-100

Firmware version 1.0.1 for the Canon Speedlite EL-100, which launched late last year alongside the EOS R camera, brings just one change. Previously, the strobe would fail to fire correctly in certain unspecified circumstances. Updating to the latest release, available here, should fix this, so if you're having any issues with your EL-100 we'd recommend giving it a try.

Ricoh GR III

And that just leaves Ricoh for this week. The company's firmware version 1.11 for the Ricoh GR III (download here) includes a fix for frame-skipping in movie playback that was inadvertently introduced in last month's v1.10 update. It also now correctly shows the firmware version number in Mac OS' USB device tree, and makes the usual general promise of "improved stability for general performance", as Ricoh / Pentax updates always do.

**Worried you might've missed a critical update lately? Don't be! Just click here for all recent Firmware Friday articles!**

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(Camera parts image courtesy of Kelly Hofer / Flickr; used under a Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0 license. Image has been modified from the original.)