E5 manual

I have been going through the owners manual for the E5 to try to learn all of the features the camera has.
The thing is I find it disjointed and difficult to follow.
Does anyone know of a clearer but comprehensive guide to the camera?

I don't know of a guide that is actually more complete than the Olympus E-5 Instruction manual. It's the only book I used to learn the E-5 when I owned it, and it did me well. But it's not without its challenges.

Most camera instruction manuals are better as reference-lookup information than as learning/teaching guides, in my experience. The way I would approach the E-5 Manual is to first review the control diagrams on pages 2 through 8, then flip to the Menu Directory on pages 146 to 152.

Once you review those two sections of the manual, you'll have in your head the basic nomenclature used by Olympus to describe the controls and features, and the scope of the menu commands ... From there you can jump to the sections of interest to you in whatever order you want/that makes sense to you (they happily provide page numbering in both sections) and explore it in an informed way.

Learning a complex camera like this (or the E-M1, or any current new pro-grade camera...) well requires a commitment to spend the time to read and experiment. It also, in the words of an professor I once had, requires that you let go of what you think you know or understand, and then open your mind to seeing what's in front of you.

A few passes through the book this way, with camera in hand, and the logic of the engineering will come to you. From there, it's just a matter of using it and practicing with the stuff you want to work with until your muscle memory is trained and embedded.

I spent about six weeks learning the E-5 when I got it in 2010, a similar time learning the E-M1 when I got it in 2013. To me, it's always been a fun journey.

G

David Busch's Guide to the Olympus E-5.

Another Place to mine information:

http://www.biofos.com/esystem/e5_tst.html

Here's what they said:

"The menu system is a blend of the E-3 system and the new Pens. The amount of customization available is superb and a MyMode/MySet feature takes over from the 'Custom Reset' procedure of the E-3."

~Cheers~