Olympus 12-100mm f/4 PRO Stuck on Manual Focus? Here’s the Fix

Many Olympus and OM System lenses have a distinctive way of toggling between manual focus and autofocus: you slide the focus ring itself forward or back.

If you’ve ever found that your Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO zoom lens seems stuck on manual focus, there’s a good chance you’ve run into this issue (especially if you’ve found this page and are here reading this!)

Unlike some other brand lenses, there’s no AF/MF switch on the side of the lens. And the camera’s own focus mode setting isn’t what’s holding it in manual focus — with the ring pulled back, the lens stays in manual focus no matter what the camera is set to.

There is a switch on the side of the barrel, and it’s easy to assume that’s the focus control. It isn’t — it’s the image stabilization switch. On this lens it controls the lens IS and the camera’s in-body stabilization together, so setting it to Off turns off both.

Instead, on this lens, what you want to look for is the ring on the lens barrel that’s farthest from the camera body — not to be confused with the filter thread at the very front, if you’re checking filter sizes for your Olympus lenses. It also happens to be the focus ring when you’re using manual focus.

But rather than turning it, you want to slide it forward or back gently. You’ll feel it click — that’s the way to toggle between manual focus and autofocus.

When it’s in manual focus mode, you’ll be able to see the distance measurement scale.

When it’s in autofocus mode, that distance scale will be covered.

If you slide the ring and nothing changes, check the camera next. Olympus and OM System bodies have an MF Clutch item in the custom menus that can be set to Inoperative, which tells the camera to ignore the ring’s position entirely. Set it back to Operative and the clutch behaves normally again.

So it’s not complicated or difficult, but it’s also not necessarily intuitive if you’re more familiar with other lenses — the same trick works on the Olympus 12-40mm f/2.8 Pro too.