Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Canon has announced new v1.1.1 firmware updates for the EOS R5 and EOS R6 mirrorless cameras. The EOS R5 has already received one firmware update to help improve overheating issues and record times recently, and now it seems some of those improvements have come to the EOS R6 as well.
The major firmware update for the EOS R6 includes a number of bug fixes and improvements, as well as the overheating issue, while the EOS R5 update is fairly minor, just resolving a couple of compatibility issues.
I never even suspected that the solution might be this simple. I don’t have an EOS R5, but I figured if it was this easy to get around Canon’s time limits on the EOS R5, somebody would have tested it already. But it turns out that the EOS R5 (and presumably EOS R6) overheating limits can be beaten by a simple clock change in the camera’s settings.
The folks at Hong Kong-based production company, Vision Rouge suggested the idea of changing the clock and a user by the name of yourboylloyd on the Magic Lantern Forums decided to see if it really was that straightforward. And, well, yes. It seems that it is.
Here at Kolari Vision, we love tearing into the newest camera gears to learn how they work and if they can be modded for infrared photography, full spectrum photography, or other things. We’ve been really excited about the R5/R6 release, and had plans to add some cooling mods and overhaul it into a proper video camera.
Reports from EOSHD that Canon uses an overheat timer rather than actual temperature readings left us a bit disappointed and calls into question whether physically cooling down the camera can actually give any more shooting time. Andrew Reid was able to bypass this timer by using a screw to override the safety shutoff switch in the battery door compartment and do a hard shutdown during recording, but this seems to corrupt video files.
Canon’s taken quite a bit of flack around the overheating issues of the EOS R5 and EOS R6 mirrorless cameras. Canon has announced new firmware for the EOS R5 which extends the recording time a little, although it’s not going to make much practical difference to many would-be Canon filmmakers.
It’s not often, though, that we see a company making a subtle little dig at a competitor for issues with their gear, though. Sigma posted a tweet that, while it doesn’t specifically call out Canon or the EOS R5 does have a rather obvious intent, extolling the not-overheating benefits of a big heatsink in the Sigma fp.
Canon has received a lot of criticism over the Canon EOS R5‘s overheating issues, especially since it started to look as if the limitations were arbitrarily imposed by Canon and not based on actual temperatures. Well, now they seem to be addressing some of those issues with a new V1.1 firmware update.
Now, this certainly isn’t going to make everybody happy, as the benefits seem relatively minor, but it is at least an improvement. As well as extending the shooting times, the firmware fixes a few typos and corrects some bugs.
There are a couple of reports right now of users managing to overcome the overheating limits of the Canon EOS R5 mirrorless camera. Well, sort of. By tricking the camera into thinking the battery slot door is closed when it’s not, people have found a way to reset the timer. But there’s a catch. Your footage is pretty much useless.
The video above by J. Marcus Photography demonstrates the technique, and how he was able to reset the timer using just a piece of tape over the battery door to make the camera think it was still closed. When the overheat warning came on, he removed the battery, reinserted it and magically the overheat warning was gone.
Okay, we all know it by now: the Canon EOS R5 is prone to overheat, which makes it unusable for serious video work. And what about the EOS R6? It’s less impressive in specs, but should you disregard it for video? Dan Watson compares the two models in his latest video and he’ll tell you why you should not underestimate the Canon R6 when it comes to video work.
After seeing numerous reports of the lengths to which people had tried and failed to cool down the Canon EOS R5 to get longer video shooting times out of it, I was starting to suspect that the “overheating” time limits might actually be coded into the camera’s firmware and it actually has nothing to do with the temperature of the camera or the environment.
Now it seems those suspicions might have some evidence after a Chinese EOS R5 owner tears his camera down to try and fix the problem himself. He posted images of the process to Baidu and we can see exactly how the EOS R5 is laid out inside, which seems designed not to aid cooling, but stifle it. A video of the teardown was also posted.
Canon R5 has proven to be an amazing camera. But sadly, it has also proven to have overheating issues. In one of his previous videos, Dan Watson used the R5 side by side with the Sony a7S, and overheating was only one of the aspects he compared. In his latest video, he has addressed this problem specifically. So, when the Canon R5 and the Sony a7S shoot side by side, which one will overheat faster? Let’s watch and see.
That Canon R5 has overheating issues is now a well-known fact. Still, the demand seems to be so high, that Canon is forced to delay the shipping of its new camera. Or is it really because of the high demand? According to the latest reports, the delays are expected precisely because of the overheating issues.
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