'Lowest Shutter Speed Setting' on the Olympus TG-6. What does it do and is it useful?

When the Olympus TG-6 Tough camera was released one of the features that some people talked about as an improvement on the TG-5 was an ability to set a limit on the lowest shutter speed. With there not being a direct way of setting the shutter speed on the TG5 or TG6 this was seen by many as a step forward.

But in reality the Lowest S/S Setting doesn’t really bring much if any advantage. To find this setting in the TG6’s menu go to menu C in the Custom Menu, select ISO Auto Set and you’ll then have two options one is the Upper Limit and Default for the Auto ISO range and the other is to set the Lowest S/S Setting.

What this setting does is allow you to set the slowest shutter speed that the camera will go down to when trying to achieve correct exposure before it will begin increasing ISO. You can only use this if you set the ISO to Auto and while you can decide what range the Auto ISO will operate between, with 100-400 being the lowest range there isn’t a great deal of point doing all this in my view.

That’s because, once the camera has increased the ISO to the highest setting in the range you’ve set, it will go back to slowing down the shutter speed beyond the ‘Lowest Shutter Speed Setting’.

With the ISO Upper Limit set to 400 and the Lowest S/S Setting at 1/200s the camera set the Shutter Speed at 1/50s to take a picture of my Boba Fett Bobblehead.

With the ISO set manually to 400 and the Lowest S/S Setting no longer being in effect the Shutter Speed the camera chose was still 1/50s. I did the same test around my office with varying light levels and the shutter speeds always came out the same for equal ISO’s.

While you may see this as still being of some use, my view is that there’s no real gain from it. It’s simple to set ISO yourself and as illustrated in the images above it will have the same impact on what the camera will set as shutter speed as when using the Lowest S/S Setting.

Hopefully this little blog has clarified what the setting does and why I don’t use it.

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