How to fix the Sony A6300 overheating issue

For a long while now, we’ve been using the Sony a6300 as a second camera/frugal 4k camera. The quality is superb and really, we could not be happier. Well, that’s a lie, we could be happier if the darn thing did not overheat after 15 minutes of use. OK, skipping to another story: Over the last few weeks, we’ve moved from our old fleet of Sandisk Extreme Pro cards to Prograde V60 cards.

We noticed that after the move to the UHS-II cards, the a6300 is no longer overheating. At least in out controlled studio environment. For testing, we turned the AC off (as you can probably tell) and plugged the a6300 into a Tethered Tools case relay to get uninterrupted power. The SanDisk Extreme pro lasted about 15 minutes, while the Prograde lasted the entire 30 minutes.

Now, here is the interesting thing, the Prograde V60 are USH-II cards. (you’ll see that the cards have more contacts). Once we moved to those cards, the camera stopped overheating and we can reach the “imposed” 30 minutes recording that the camera provides, effectively doubling the recording time we get from it.

Interestingly, the Sony a6300 does not have a UHS-II slot. Nonetheless, UHS-II is compatible with UHS-I so there were no compatibility issues. For me, the next thing is to test the camera outside the studio. It’s 40 degrees centigrade here, so that would be an interesting test. We also want to test other UHS-II cards to see if this behavior is specific to the ProGrade cards or to any UHS-II cards.

Links

• Sony a6300 (B&H, Amazon)
• SanDisk Extreme Pro (B&H, Amazon)
• ProGrade V60 (B&H, Amazon)
• Tether Tools Case Relay (B&H, Amazon)