Canon 550D and Magic Lantern

lucky_13

lucky_13

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Does anyone know if by installing the Magic Lantern firmware on a Canon 550D would void the warranty?
 
"Technically speaking, yes, installing Magic Lantern will void your warranty. However since it is loaded on the fly and is stored on the CF card (it modifies nothing on your camera's system at all... As I said above it is best to think of it as something that is an 'overlay' to your camera's normal firmware), simply taking out the CF card and restarting your camera will return your camera to a state as though it had never had Magic Lantern on it. With this in mind, if you did have a warranty issue, essentially Canon would have no way of knowing whether or not you ever had Magic Lantern installed."

Taken from here

From personal experience, I'd say give it a whirl. I looked hard to find anyone with any issues having installed it, and found none. In fact, I've yet to come across someone saying that they don't like it.

Takes a bit of getting to grips with, but well worth the effort IMO.
 
pel said:
"Technically speaking, yes, installing Magic Lantern will void your warranty. However since it is loaded on the fly and is stored on the CF card (it modifies nothing on your camera's system at all... As I said above it is best to think of it as something that is an 'overlay' to your camera's normal firmware), simply taking out the CF card and restarting your camera will return your camera to a state as though it had never had Magic Lantern on it. With this in mind, if you did have a warranty issue, essentially Canon would have no way of knowing whether or not you ever had Magic Lantern installed."

Taken from here

From personal experience, I'd say give it a whirl. I looked hard to find anyone with any issues having installed it, and found none. In fact, I've yet to come across someone saying that they don't like it.

Takes a bit of getting to grips with, but well worth the effort IMO.
Click to expand...

So it's installed on the sdhc card!? Is it what a CF card is?
 
Yeah it will be installed on the SDHC card, a CF card is a compact flash which isn't used on the 550D model.
 
Indeed, it is.

There are a few installation tutorials available on youtube. It's a simple enough exercise tho' :)
 
bensambrook said:
Yeah it will be installed on the SDHC card, a CF card is a compact flash which isn't used on the 550D model.
Click to expand...

So I'm guessing if I wanted to uninstall it if I didn't get on with it would be a matter of formatting the sdhc card?!

Thanks for the advice guys.
 
From what I gather, yes. With a simple reinstall of the original firmware.

Full details here

Tbh, tho' I can't see you wanting to delete it. Updating upon new releases maybe, but NOT deleting it :)
 
pel said:
From what I gather, yes. With a simple reinstall of the original firmware.

Full details here

Tbh, tho' I can't see you wanting to delete it. Updating upon new releases maybe, but NOT deleting it :)
Click to expand...

You don't have to uninstall magic lantern, you just delete it from your memory card, nothing is actually installed on the camera itself. There is an e-mail from Canon that has been documented on some forums that says using magic lantern will not effect your warranty as there are no physical changes to the camera.

However, there are plenty of warnings in all magic lantern documentation so that you are aware of the fact you are responsible for anything that may go wrong.
 
My advice would be to just go for it - just make sure that you get the right version of ML. It works fine on my 600D.
 
yes,you can apply it
 
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I have never heard of a ML firmware, looks interesting :) Whats the advantages for video?
 
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Take a look at their wiki page:
http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Unified
It was developed originally with video shooters in mind :)
I'm not likely to use the video bits much but even the stills enhancements are well worth installing it for.
*BTW, my install went flawlessly. Followed the instructions carefully regarding boot flag on SD card and latest Canon firmware etc.
 
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Carter64 said:
Followed the instructions carefully regarding boot flag on SD card and latest Canon firmware etc.
Click to expand...

I watched the install video which looks simple, not sure what you mean about the above?
 
Chr1stof said:
I watched the install video which looks simple, not sure what you mean about the above?
Click to expand...
The SD card has to be bootable. Storage devices can have various 'flags' set, one of which is 'boot'. ML needs to boot itself from the SD card to install. I'm sure there's one or more free utilities in Windows that does this, I use Linux and used gPartEd. Don't forget to RTFM, the points about formatting the card in camera and resetting all custom settings is likely to be important. You can re-do them after install. ML probably/maybe works if you don't but I didn't risk it.
I'm quite confident that if you Google 'make boot Windows SD freeware' you should get back something useful.
If you have something like a partition manager (Partition Magic etc) anyway, there will be an option to manage flags. Just select the SD card and set it to boot.
Fdisk can do this (comes as part of Windows, or at least used to) but it's command line. I'm not familiar with Windows, so it may even be a case of right-clicking :)
 
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It's very simple :)

ML has so many good features there are too many to list but here are a few:

audio meters
manual audio control
focus assist (incredibly useful)
clean output
millions of display options such as time remaining per 12 min, card, 30 min etc
cropmarks (useful for shooting anamorphic)
different picture styles for standby and record
magic focus in AF live mode
completely manual white balance control (550D does not have this normally)
native ISO settings
shutter speed control in degrees
 
does anyone know if it makes any changes to the still image side of things?
 
It allows you to do stuff such as interval meters, motion detection, advanced histograms etc for stills.
 
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