We report on the results of an I-band time-series photometric survey of NGC 2547 using the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope with Wide Field Imager, achieving better than 1 per cent photometric precision per data point over 14~<I~<18. Candidate cluster members were selected from a V versus V-I colour-magnitude diagram over 12.5<V<24 (covering masses from 0.9M_{sun}_ down to below the brown dwarf limit), finding 800 candidates, of which we expect ~330 to be real cluster members, taking into account contamination from the field (which is most severe at the extremes of our mass range). Searching for periodic variations in these gave 176 detections over the mass range 0.1~<M/M_{sun}_<0.9.