EOSHD testing finds Canon EOS R5 overheating to be fake, with artificial timers deployed to lock out video mode

erek

erek

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"An internal temperature of 46C isn’t too hot for a CPU or memory card, or anything else, to operate normally.

62C isn’t too hot to carry on recording in 8K. Had the camera reached 95C, I could have accepted what Canon is telling us.

As it stands, I believe them to be lying to their customers.

My conclusion is that these are artificial software limits. The overheating problem after a few minutes of 8K does not exist and nor does it at 46C.

That the processor doesn’t even have a thermal pad or conductivity internally to ensure longevity and reliability, is another “smoking gun”. I find this deeply unethical.

I demand that Canon come clean on what they have done.

I’d also like to know what they plan to do in terms of a firmware change to remove the artificial timers.

As a paying customer I do not accept being lied to."

https://www.eoshd.com/news/eoshd-te...icial-timers-deployed-to-lock-out-video-mode/
 
He did disassembly as well IIRC. From what I can see the memory cards are in the line of fire. The artificial limitations may be to essentially protect the health of the cards. Although it seems really hard to know the truth of all of these matters.
I generally speaking like Andrew Reid. But I'm also willing to give the Canon engineers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the limitations with the R5 and R6. There has been a massive backlash due to the limitations of these cameras. It's obviously bad PR for them. If it's as easy as a software fix, I'm certain that Canon would have simply "fixed it". But that may just be because I'm less conspiratorial about all this stuff.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
He did disassembly as well IIRC. From what I can see the memory cards are in the line of fire. The artificial limitations may be to essentially protect the health of the cards. Although it seems really hard to know the truth of all of these matters.
I generally speaking like Andrew Reid. But I'm also willing to give the Canon engineers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the limitations with the R5 and R6. There has been a massive backlash due to the limitations of these cameras. It's obviously bad PR for them. If it's as easy as a software fix, I'm certain that Canon would have simply "fixed it". But that may just be because I'm less conspiratorial about all this stuff.
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I agree, these are analog sensors, not some Sandy Bridge CPU running digital logic at a Tjunction of 105C. Even modern "digital logic" is slowly lowering their max temps as the underlying analog circuits are running closer to threshold.

Furthermore, the reviewer is still relying entirely on Canon's self-reported temperature value. Temperature of.... what? The USB charge port? The main display? The image sensor (what part of it?)? The sensor's logic IC? The image processing chip? The reviewer sure doesn't know.

Topped off with this gem of a line from the reviewer:
If you leave a plate of fries on your dinner table for 20 minutes, do you expect it to be still piping hot?
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Depends if the fries are encapsulated inside a plastic, glass, and metal contraption. I wouldn't wrap my CPU heatsink with a plastic, glass, and metal body then complain that the fries on the table are no longer piping hot, but why do I care about deliberate mischaracterization? Is this what the camera review world is like?
 
Nothing new, Canon did it years ago with the 1Dx to 1Dc. Ill take it as is, they could have left out 8K completely and been the usual old Canon...
 
jeremyshaw said:
Is this what the camera review world is like?
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This is what the world is like - at least in the west. Without getting political, basically everyone has an agenda and everyone wants to push an agenda rather than being balanced. I could list a bunch of examples of this, but I'll leave it at this: there are reviews of literally every product in the world done in the same way to more or lesser degrees. If you haven't noticed this, then you've only been listening to people that are biased towards the direction you favor. It's basically unwise at this point to only get one view point for anything, let alone just reviews; you're in a lot better shape if you're at least listening to some people that disagree with your position. Preferably, at least to me, moderates on both sides.

aokman said:
Nothing new, Canon did it years ago with the 1Dx to 1Dc. Ill take it as is, they could have left out 8K completely and been the usual old Canon...
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We all have our opinions about this, but personally based upon what I can see, the R5 and R6 are both not worth it to buy at all if you need to do consistent video work. As it will literally overheat in every mode other than line-skipped 4k 24p; which, is its least good looking mode. And its recovery times are so long that you'd have to have 3-4 cameras on set to swap between in order to keep shooting when it does (often 15 minutes or more for another paltry 5 minutes of shooting time necessitating longer cool down times in order to get longer shoot times back). The only other way around this is to use an external recorder like the Atomos Ninja V, but doing so eliminates the ability to use 8k or 4k 120fps as the Ninja V is incapable of using either of those two headline modes. It would allow for extended down-sampled 4k though, which would at least increase apparent detail over the 4k line-skipped mode. Still if your goal was to shoot a film in 8k, this camera won't really help you get there.

The irony about this being uncharacteristic for Canon is that they released a half-baked product. If this camera was made to be bullet proof it would have been undeniably the greatest camera of this gen (beating the A7S 3 and S1H amongst others). But now it's mired in at best controversy at best and at worst a failure of a product with incredibly niche uses - in terms of video. Obviously the camera is fantastic at stills, but there have been plenty of cameras before this that are also fantastic at stills. So in that use case it's not providing anything particularly revolutionary.
 
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UnknownSouljer said:
This is what the world is like - at least in the west. Without getting political, basically everyone has an agenda and everyone wants to push an agenda rather than being balanced. I could list a bunch of examples of this, but I'll leave it at this: there are reviews of literally every product in the world done in the same way to more or lesser degrees. If you haven't noticed this, then you've only been listening to people that are biased towards the direction you favor. It's basically unwise at this point to only get one view point for anything, let alone just reviews; you're in a lot better shape if you're at least listening to some people that disagree with your position. Preferably, at least to me, moderates on both sides.


We all have our opinions about this, but personally based upon what I can see, the R5 and R6 are both not worth it to buy at all if you need to do consistent video work. As it will literally overheat in every mode other than line-skipped 4k 24p; which, is its least good looking mode. And its recovery times are so long that you'd have to have 3-4 cameras on set to swap between in order to keep shooting when it does (often 15 minutes or more for another paltry 5 minutes of shooting time necessitating longer cool down times in order to get longer shoot times back). The only other way around this is to use an external recorder like the Atomos Ninja V, but doing so eliminates the ability to use 8k or 4k 120fps as the Ninja V is incapable of using either of those two headline modes. It would allow for extended down-sampled 4k though, which would at least increase apparent detail over the 4k line-skipped mode. Still if your goal was to shoot a film in 8k, this camera won't really help you get there.

The irony about this being uncharacteristic for Canon is that they released a half-baked product. If this camera was made to be bullet proof it would have been undeniably the greatest camera of this gen (beating the A7S 3 and S1H amongst others). But now it's mired in at best controversy at best and at worst a failure of a product with incredibly niche uses - in terms of video. Obviously the camera is fantastic at stills, but there have been plenty of cameras before this that are also fantastic at stills. So in that use case it's not providing anything particularly revolutionary.
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I want a stills camera first that also does good video... Canons lenses are best in class so its a no brainer for me... Canon could have left out those video features completely but they didn’t, a little progress in the right direction compared to how they used to operate...
 
aokman said:
I want a stills camera first that also does good video...
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But it doesn't. Because it's not reliable. If it's not reliable it can't really be used for that use case.

I've consumed a huge amount of content on both the A7S3 and R5/R6. Like an absurd amount. Believe me when I say the conclusion from literally everyone that has touched an R5 is that you're not going to be able to use any of it's headline modes for serious work because the camera merely being on will "overheat" the camera preventing you from using those modes. There-by making them essentially useless unless all of the content you're trying to produce can be shot in 15 minute segments once every 2 hours.

So although you can use the 4k line skipped mode indefinitely (say for a wedding), if you wanted to switch into a slow-mo mode or 8k or anything else, you won't be able to because the camera will have already "overheated" past being able to use that mode. To that end, PotatoJet released an R5 vs A7S3 video today where they show that happening. I'd also recommend watching both of Gerald Undone's separate videos for the R5 and A7S3. That is if you're not going to take my word for it. Gerald Undone's review was I think the best overall in comparison to all the both watched content and read content on all of these particular issues.

aokman said:
Canons lenses are best in class so its a no brainer for me...
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This is subjective at best. I've shot on both systems. There is nothing that Canon makes that has any substantive difference from things that Sony makes and or Sony/Zeiss makes (or Nikon or Fuji for that matter).

And even if you think they do, you can take all of Canon's EF lenses and use them on all Sony E-Mount cameras.

aokman said:
Canon could have left out those video features completely but they didn’t, a little progress in the right direction compared to how they used to operate...
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I don't see any issue with being conservative. And I didn't mind the way Canon operated before. Being conservative but delivering a rock solid product is far better than being not conservative and producing a product that only works in very specific conditions for a very short period of time.
 
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From this reporting, it seems pretty clear that the overheat control is at least using timers as a backup mechanism; you'd need to test in hot ambient conditions or something to see if it will claim overheating with a higher temperature. However, that doesn't mean overheating isn't a real concern, and it might not be the CPU we should worry about, imaging sensors are sensitive to temperature, the hotter they are, the noisier they are.

Lots of primarily still cameras have timer lockouts for video and live view, but maybe this one comes up a lot because it wasn't well documented?
 
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aokman said:
I want a stills camera first that also does good video... Canons lenses are best in class so its a no brainer for me... Canon could have left out those video features completely but they didn’t, a little progress in the right direction compared to how they used to operate...
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Best in what class? The Class that overheats shooting 8K video?

Lots of good pro glass out there, Canon being the best in class is highly debatable.
 
So you can find out a way to work around the limitation. Does that mean you can now cause some component on the board to become overheated and fail? I'm sure in some scenarios the limitation is probably just that and you can side step it and never have an issue. Much like overclocking a computer. But someone on the engineering side needs to decide what is acceptable usage within their stated operating temps and make a broad call to make sure they don't have a high failure rate. I'd trust that the engineers who built these cameras did actual testing and found some type of failure or another value they were testing to be out of spec, so they looked at their actual data and decided on where an acceptable cut off is. You don't hear about many camera failures, so I'm much more inclined to believe they are tightly controlling the process versus just putting in a cut off for the sake of stopping video recording. Obviously we'll never be able to hear the engineering side of the equation, so it's easy to just assume someone's speculation is true.
 
Meeho said:
Why are you so sure it was an engineering decision?
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My guess would be because sensors overheat. A fixed timer solution is hacky, but not necessarily motivated by sales or market segmentation. Not that this *isn't* marketing, just that there is reason to believe it's technical.
 
What is the logic backing that this is a conspiracy to sell more cameras?

If this camera doesn't work for video you're not going to wait for next years model. You're going to go buy a different camera, most likely from a different company that makes one better for video.
 
Meeho said:
Why are you so sure it was an engineering decision?
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I don't think I've ever seen a marketing slide that says up to x minutes of x resolution video. No one is making a distinction about recording time on any camera, it's just one of those fine print things. Kind of like how you can buy a car that is capable of doing 130mph, but has a governor set below 100 mph. It's there and no one talks about it, it's a necessary limitation of the product. If they were that concerned about canabalizing sales of other models, it probably would be marketed as a feature rather than a design limitation. You'd see marketing on the cinema cameras that boasted about unlimited recording capabilities, and all of the other products would have some type of limitation associated with their cost.

If anyone else were putting 8k on the market, it would be interesting to see if they come up with the same limits. We're talking about a relatively small device that is doing high end recording. If you bought a cinema camera the body is more than 2x the size and weight, so there is likely more room to play with cooling and heat dissipation. The other thing I really have to wonder is even if you didn't have a limit, how long could you conceivably record? I'd have to imagine a 15 minute recording probably eats like half the battery pack, so you'd probably only get 30minutes before it dies anyway. But that actually brings up an interesting thought, I wonder if the issue isn't a cpu cooling issue but a battery limitation. Discharging half a battery in 15 minutes would definitely generate some heat, so it's possible the reviewer isn't even looking at the right component. If there were concerns about pre-mature battery failure, I could see that as a good reason to limit recording time. But once again it's just complete speculation unless an engineer gives any type of explanation for why there is a limit.
 
bman212121 said:
If anyone else were putting 8k on the market, it would be interesting to see if they come up with the same limits.
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I don't think anyone else is doing 8k or 4k HD (4x oversampled 4k) with this sensor size in this small of a body.
bman212121 said:
If you bought a cinema camera the body is more than 2x the size and weight, so there is likely more room to play with cooling and heat dissipation.
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While this is quite likely what Canon would prefer you do, and they quite likely will put this technology to work in their own cinema camera refreshes, there's also the issue with IBIS.

Kind of feels like Canon tried to do too much too fast, and with too many competing variables; they shrunk the '5D' body, they added an extremely processing-intensive, sensor-intensive, and storage-intensive functionality set, and they added an extremely aggressive IBIS system, all at once.

In a vacuum, all of these changes work extremely well and are even first-rate, but together, they produce a limitation that really detracts from much of the camera's star appeal.


Essentially, it looks like it'll take Canon (and likely Sony as well) another generation to get this level of sensor performance into such a small body. Sony seems have hit a significantly better balance for video with the A7S III and it's pretty obvious that if stills aren't the bulk of the work, it's the better camera.

Where I can see the R5 taking off is in mostly stills usage where the 5D / D8x0 cameras are typically used, for those that do video as well but don't need the intensive features, and those that are willing to work within the cameras limitations in order to access those features.

bman212121 said:
The other thing I really have to wonder is even if you didn't have a limit, how long could you conceivably record? I'd have to imagine a 15 minute recording probably eats like half the battery pack, so you'd probably only get 30minutes before it dies anyway. But that actually brings up an interesting thought, I wonder if the issue isn't a cpu cooling issue but a battery limitation. Discharging half a battery in 15 minutes would definitely generate some heat, so it's possible the reviewer isn't even looking at the right component. If there were concerns about pre-mature battery failure, I could see that as a good reason to limit recording time. But once again it's just complete speculation unless an engineer gives any type of explanation for why there is a limit.
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Canon's still using an evolution of the LP-E6, which while not a real limiting factor for the camera with stills, might be a problem with respect to high power draw scenarios, especially given the grip location near the memory card slots.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Not sure why you quoted me. That isn’t really relevant to what I was talking about.
If you want a stills camera the R5 and R6 are both excellent. You will not hear an argument from me regarding that. But then again, there were at least half a dozen other options that predated the R5 and R6, Some even from Canon themselves, All of which can fulfill this purpose.
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just thought perhaps you'd be interested in that particular article is all


i used to be into astrophotography and videography
 
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