New round of thermal "tests"

With the lens on, and the camera sitting on a table, all covers closed and LCD folded against the camera back but not on we ran it for 18 minutes before getting a temp warning. The hottest part of the camera was the back behind the LCD door (43°C / 109°F), followed by the rear body around the command/set dials and the area of the grip where you rest your thumb (40°C / 104°F). The bottom plate around the tripod socket reached 38°C / 100°F.

At this point, we decided that the thermometers we were using were reading from a 1cm² area, which was kind of a blunt tool. So I got a little FLIR IR camera, spent some time checking it’s readings against both of the thermometers we used, and decided it was just as accurate and gave us a lot more information.

In case of R5 all this was big waste of time (it is waste of time for any camera until you measure how comfortable it is to hold it for people).

The chassis and shell of most cameras have been developed for years to be strong and light (most manufacturers use similar material). I’ve never thought they conducted heat well, but I didn’t know for sure.

I used a narrow-gauge heat gun to heat the shell and see what happened.

Even students already started to cry here.

I overlaid an image from our teardown on the thermal image to show what’s right below there. Duh, the area over the processor and SDRAM cards.

Who could have thought this? :-) And again - with back on here, it is just overlay!

It had been clear understanding between tech educated people that R5 issue is the processor area, its design and limits of LSI.

The bottom is my favorite in this group. Notice how every screw that goes into the metal tripod plate is lighting up. The lens mount ring is pretty hot, too, with a temp of 38°C.

All it means that due to questionable cooling design it is only few of more or less exposed metal parts (read - only things that can transfer heat from inside to outside good).

And "new" firmware, Andrew says it is Canon playing with timers:

We got a longer run after upgrading to V1.1, getting 25 minutes before cut off, but at the expense of slightly higher temps.

To sensor

The sensor radiated quite a bit of heat, too. It wasn’t as hot as the card slot, but has a bigger surface area. It may also be that the metal in the IBIS unit is hot and that’s leaking out through the sensor area.

Here we have complex reflective surface that can affect measurement significantly (that authors did not understand), but overall IBIS sensors are very bad considering long time full sensor readout, as they have no way to dissipate the heat except the air around. Fixed sensor can be made much better cooled, it is also why companies always try to control how DR and noise are being measured in review for such cameras (as they are best if you do it in cool place and camera did not run before for long time).

https://wordpress.lensrentals.com/blog/2020/09/investigating-the-canon-r5-heat-emission/

So, all we have is mostly useless post made in non-systematic manner. Very sad.

Whole thing can be made due to this final words (as Lensrentals have innate interest to not have their R5 batch of the bodies suddenly devalue 2-3 times due to fixed new edition of camera):

Is Canon going to “fix this” as people keep saying? I doubt that’s possible, and I really doubt Canon thinks it needs fixing. I believe they consider it primarily a photography camera that can shoot some video. There may be another tweak or two, but I speculate that operating temps have to be kept at some level, and that cool down is always going to be slow. A firmware hack or update isn’t going to make the camera cool better; it’s going to allow it to work hotter. I think that probably isn’t a good idea.

Gentle ping-pong

Johnnie: Both cameras suffered from overheating issues in video recording and more than that, long recovery times. By introducing the latest firmware update, it seems as if Canon is trying to overcome some of those issues by allowing longer recording and shorter recovery waiting times (until the camera can film again). What exactly is causing those cameras to overheat and what’s the new FW doing in order to help here?

Katsuyuki Nagai-san – Canon: I think we should look at the fundamentals of the whole topic to give a better perspective. The cameras feature cutting edge features squeezed into compact bodies designed to offer weather resistance.

This is where we come to the first of the two governing factors that affect the cameras when it comes to overheating. Holding a very warm object for an extended period has the potential to result in what is known as low temperature burns. Secondary is to protect the internal components of the camera from the overheating. We limit how hot the external body of the camera can get to protect users, which is one of the causes of overheat shutdown. Some heat management must also be applied to ensure the camera continues to operate.

Note that Canon PR and marketing is doing with thermal scandal - they try to bury it all under piles of useless info. They contacted lot of people lately and offered to publish as much texts and videos as possible (with their SEO help and special paid Google promotions).

Interesting, nice cheap and useful mod. This little green board position though :p I guess a redesigned copper heat sink(the aluminium one under the little green board) that will be bigger and get more contact points with the base plate and some well placed pads to connect to the rear plate would allow 8K for 1h with less time recovery.