Thermal vision tests suggest Canon may not be able to “fix” the EOS R5’s heat issues
Sep 10, 2020
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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LensRentals just recently posted their teardown of the Canon EOS R5 and noticed that it has some pretty hefty seals to help protect it from the elements when shooting outdoors in harsh conditions. But they theorised that those seals and the tightly packed components might hamper the EOS R5’s heat dissipation abilities.
Well, now, Roger and the team at LensRentals have pointed a FLIR thermal IR camera at it to see exactly how hot the Canon EOS R5 gets after it’s been on for a while at different parts of the camera body. And some of it… Well, it gets extremely hot!
The guys performed several tests on the shell of the camera first, which showed that it held up against heat pretty well, by warming a section of it up to 180°F. But they say it took over 10 minutes to cool back down to room temperature – raising the question of how heat is supposed to escape when it’s fixed onto the camera.
It’s worth noting that the first round of tests was performed with the original the v1.0 firmware and not the recently released v1.1 firmware. When setting it down to shoot 8K with a CFexpress card in the slot and the LCD flipped out, the hotspot on the back of the camera quickly became quite obvious under the heat vision of the FLIR camera.
This is exactly the spot where the processor and SDRAM chips live – which isn’t really going to be much of a surprise to anybody. The top of the camera remained fairly cool, with the hotshoe essentially only warming up to 23°C. But as they approached the 20-minute cut-off point, things started to heat up a bit. Much of the camera’s exterior hovered around 40°C.
The camera was then left to cool, upgraded to the v1.1 firmware and the test was performed again. Now, it’s a 25-minute cut-off time, 5 minutes longer than the original firmware. The runtimes did increase the temperature of the camera’s exterior, but only very slightly – less than 1°C difference in most cases.
What was significantly hotter, though, was the CFexpress slot, which rose from 47.7°C (with the v1.0 firmware and a 15-minute cut-off) to 57.1°C with the v1.1 firmware and a 20-minute cut-off. That’s hot enough to potentially cause third-degree burns with just a few seconds of skin contact.
All in all, though, it doesn’t look like Canon can do anything about the potential overheating issues – at least not if you’re saving out 8K to CFexpress. Even the workarounds, while they may work for a little while, may also kill your camera eventually because there’s just nowhere for the heat to go. Sure, you might be able to do something with a hardware modification to cool the components, but then you’ve probably voided your warranty.
It looks like this probably isn’t the camera for you if video’s your primary thing.
Check out the complete set of tests as well as Roger, Joey and Aaron’s thoughts over on the LensRentals blog.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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11 responses to “Thermal vision tests suggest Canon may not be able to “fix” the EOS R5’s heat issues”
Looks like the overheating myth isn’t much of a myth after all. So what happens to the temperatures when shooting in 4K 60p? Sure it can’t shoot in 8K unless it’s for B-Roll and cropping purposes, but how hot does the camera get when performing the standard 4K video mode?
Actually, the resizing process 8K to 4K is also using computing power, so it’s not helping a lot to reduce heat.
The main suggestion is to shoot with SD card more than CFExpress.
Even my CFExpress card reader just getting super hot when I’m reading footage. I’m not sure why it produces so much heat.
There is a simple solution and that’s trade this in and get yourself a Sony a7Siii that doesn’t overheat
If you want a 12 mp camera strictly for video, yes, absolutely. If you want an awesome still camera for shooting fine art prints and commercial photography, and only occasionally for hq 4k or 8k short clips (and all you want for HD or regular quality 4k) then no. It all depends on what you need the camera for. The a7s is essentially a video camera. It isn’t the best choice for stills. The R5 is essentially a stills camera and may not be the best choice for video.
Sure, but the advertising for the R5 was a big 8K video poster, no?
Is there a complete disconnection between marketing and reality?
Right about now some idiots are realizing that they tore apart and voided their warranty on their 4,000 dollar cameras for no reason. Some of them will still defeat the overheating timer to stubbornly “prove” that the R5 can shoot 8k for longer than 20 minutes only to have the camera burn out in 6 months or a year; then they will be on here complaining about Canon’s “lack of reliability”!!
The people who tore it apart were looking for a way to circumvent the overheating.
They were not concerned with warranties.
Most of them just thought they knew more than they actually know about how cameras operate.
Pretty sure anyone tearing open a camera and tinkering around with it could care less about the warranty and know what they’re getting into. With all due respect, $4000 is also completely subjective, some people spend that much on dinner out. Tearing a camera apart may be a hobby for some. Look at car modding, liquid cooling your GPU, etc etc. What I’m humbling saying is, just because something does not fit your narrative does not mean it doesn’t fit someone else’s. To each his/her own…
Check the video.
Even with water cooling, the camera stops recording with the first version of the firmware and ask 40mn cooling time. (4K25p or 8K…)
Still think it’s fine?
This is primarily a stills camera with video capabilities. A Canon exec pretty much said that they included 8K for marketing reasons: https://petapixel.com/2021/01/20/canon-exec-suggests-the-eos-r5-only-has-8k-for-marketing-reasons/
Is Canon going to address the hardware/design reasons for these heat problems with a mii version?
All you have to do is save data to an external source like an atomos ninja V and no heat issues. You don’t need to modify the R5, it can record for 2 hours +.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kmGzCBA_8fc&feature=youtu.be