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EOSHD testing finds Canon EOS R5 overheating to be fake, with artificial timers deployed to lock out video mode. In this test, we will probe my Canon EOS R5’s actual internal temperature in Celsius, as reported by the firmware. This week CDA-TEK and I are developing an Android app for the Canon EOS R5, which connects to the camera via the Canon API... Please read the rest of the article on the blog carefully before commenting below

I suspected Canon to cripple this camera somehow, someway but this artificial heat limit and recovery time is really out of line. Such arrogance! But you know what? Canon may think they control the market but we have the power to control them by boycotting Canon. Especially nowadays with the camera industry bleeding as it is. Force Canon to stop this BS. How? If you already purchased the camera, return it. If you have it on order, cancel it. Cancel all orders with Canon. Write letters to Canon showing your disgust. Call Canon and voice your disapproval. Fight Canon with your pocketbook. Stop the BS.

A good reaction on Twitter: I agree with Quinn about it being a bad look. They need to at the very least come clean, answer, own up and apologise. Then fix it.

Andrew's point is still valid though : ) Thanks you two @Andrew Reid @BTM_Pix for your guts and service to filmmaking, keep going your focus and hard work :- )

How about we turn the camera on, do nothing with it, leave it in the menus. Put it in the freezer. After 1 hour, see if the timer has ticked down to 0 mins of 8K. Who wants to see an OVERHEATED! SHUTTING DOWN! screen with frost on it?

Absolutely. Sigma and Panasonic are my top picks

If there is indeed a hardware problem such as the LSI running too hot or certain parts of the chip not turning off when idle, then Canon may have originally developed this kind of temperature monitoring system to keep things in check. But the fake element of it is that the actual temps my camera is reporting are nowhere near problematic and the recovery timer is completely out of whack with both ambient temps and the actual cool down temps of the electronics. So it is likely they found a convenient outlet in the temp management system for a classic Cripple Hammer. I want answers from Canon and I will be seeking them starting tomorrow.

I did something similar. I recorded 4k 24p HQ externally via the Atomos with no cards in for 35 mins or so. Then shut the camera and inserted the CfExpress card and tried to record in 4k120fps and see how much time I get. I only got 5 mins left in 4k 120!! So this tells me, using the ninja V is only good for recording 4k HQ 24 fps and after that the camera becomes useless for any high frame rate recording in 4k, let alone 8k. Got hit hard with the cripple hammer lol.

OK but after you've finished doing your 9 1/2 weeks remake perhaps you could do some more testing of the R5.

Shame on you Canon! I still hope they will come to try fixing this embarrassing mess. Brand value is definitely higher than the sale of a few C line units.

This is truly amazing testing @Andrew Reid! I was honestly skeptical in the very, very beginning that Canon could possibly fake the camera overheating as a means to cripple it and protect the cinema line. But, wow. Using their own tools and measurements shows the damning truth. Your test results should be used as exhibits A-Z in a class action lawsuit. Truly sad that Canon thought they could pull this $hit.

And I will be one of them. I could not care less about Canon, Sony or any other business and how they treat their customers. If Canon give me the camera I want which NO other manufacturer can offer me, I'll buy it even if they initially lied about overheating. It's not like they killed children in Africa. They are little bastards trying to make us buy their big Cine cameras by crippling the R5 but that's about it. If they offer the best I'll buy the best. I am not gonna buy a much inferior A7S III just to punish Canon lol. Now that's if they make it the best, which means removing that software limit. If they keep it as is, the R5 is then the inferior product and is good for a return and other companies can take my money. Consumers have no mercy. I can tell you that if they don't change that they will loose all video shooters on the R5. Maybe they don't care and won't change it, if they want that money they will change it and people will buy it. Maybe 2 or 3 people won't for punishing the bad Canon but ultimately they are punishing themselves from not using the superior product. There is no way around it. Fix the god damn camera so we can buy it, or sell it to photographers only and go F yourself Canon.

More SOOC footage at 50/100p from the "No Limits" launch video by Jacques Crafford. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kYjaH84X9871d8-Rmuj9DOXfmtAH6V6i?fbclid=IwAR3LPZ7njD6UadrWtejYeGQHq5hfTCNOKXBrdliOZ4w4cvrja5IrzGgRnhY

Without pressure on their courtyard nothing will happen.

Rolling shutter times are in and they are impressive.

It would definitely make a compelling documentary in the right hands - I'd be up for helping to fund it.

I think they'd make more money just putting good stuff out, to be honest. No games. If the EOS R5 is capable of longer record times in 4K HQ and 8K, just give them us. We paid for it! We get to decide how we use it. Especially as it was marketed for pro video use.

My favorite saying is chase the tech not the tech (chase the technique not the technology). It takes a lot for me to buy something new. I have drawers full of ideas that seemed great at the time and either it did not perform like it was advertised or it just wasn't as useful as it seemed once I owned it. Now it takes me weeks just to buy simple things like brackets.

Why does it need 25 mins in the freezer to get back to baseline temp? It defies logic. You heat a metal baking tray to 60C and try putting it in the freezer! It's cold after a minute. It may be that extreme temp changes do change the artificial timer. It's still fake though. Otherwise the camera would be ready to go again after a couple of mins in the freezer. I have officially received permission from The Girlfriend for some time with the fridge later and some frozen peas. But to be honest, writing is already on the wall as far as I'm concerned. And Jesse did not tell us how long his measurements on all the parts and camera areas took after he stopped recording 8K. So the 25 mins isn't the total time of idle off-time and even if it is, it doesn't show that the timer isn't artificially locking us out from the camera for unnecessarily long periods.

Even if it turns out that the EXIF "camera temperature" has no relation to the temperature of the DIGIC X chip, the test results still confirm fake overheat timers. Why - let me explain: 1. CDA TEK's (BTM_PIX)'s app reads the temperature inhibitors. If the EXIF temp sensor is on a separate board and is not reading the CPU core temps, it would still increase if the CPU got hotter. The CPU is the primary heat source in the camera body and heats up the entire unit. We show that the temp inhibitors toggle on over time, even as the EXIF reported temp stays level at 46C or even decreases (as well as camera body external temps to the touch). 2. After powering off an electronic device or CPU, the part dissipates most of the 90C+ heat within seconds. If opening the card door, the chipset even then has a venting hole. Hot air escapes and dissipates quickly. When I switched off the camera for 1 hour and opened the card door, removed battery and lens, the temp inhibitors were left on even after 1 hour. It is impossible for the CPU to maintain 60C+ temps (33C above ambient temperature!) in this situation with no power. 3. The temp inhibitors flag ON even when the camera is not recording. They flag ON in the Wifi menu. ON in live-view. ON during stills shooting. If these processes are causing problematic temperatures for the CPU, it should shut the camera down in stills mode, but it doesn't... it can be left on. Sure, but see my point 1 & 2 above. A separate temp sensor would not stay at 46C if a main CPU at 90C started heating the body and internal air. And heat distribution via air does not take 1 hour between a hot silicon chip and the ambient air right next to it and in/around the card slot. The Chinese heat gun shows this not to be the case, but anyway, if the sensor is the limiting part that gets too hot, it would have to shut down during an 8K (45 megapixel) photo shoot at the same time it shuts down for 8K video. Are you talking about consumer health & safety regulations regarding contact with hot surfaces? Or stability and integrity internal materials? This depends on the plastic. You can have plastic parts inside the camera that don't melt until 170C. And as for metal....Well, even solder does not melt at 46C! See? The sensor readout isn't the heat limited part. Nope. The problem occurs even with an SD card, which can be used for unlimited 4K recording in other devices without issue. They don't get very hot (as in 80C+), maybe 50C max. You can read/write for hours on an SD card in a reader so it isn't about SD card safety regulations. There are cameras like the S1H that write 6K or 4K at 400Mbit to SD cards. Higher data rates than EOS R5 4K HQ. They don't get that hot though. I know, I've tried. This is just speculative on your part I'm afraid. The Cfexpress card I have does get 'a bit warm like a cake'... but not scolding! You can use it in a device that records 4K RAW for hours. So I hardly think that there's anything about the comparatively low-bitrate 4K HQ 8bit H.264 (with CLOG disabled) on the EOS R5 that causes the Cfexpress card to heat up beyond the safety regulations. Yes they can. I agree. They owe us a full and frank explanation. In my opinion lying to customers is not a good look!

My thoughts exactly. Fix the issue and I honestly won't give a shit. I prefer RF mount, I prefer RF lenses, I prefer Canon colors, I prefer their dual pixel autofocus for video and I just prefer how canon footage looks compared to Sony. So like you said, me putting my foot down and going to another brand to "teach them a lesson!" only screws me over, since I would be switching to a camera that I personally do not want and in my eyes is inferior compared to the R5 as a true hybrid 50/50 photos and stills camera. Though to be honest, if they just leave the external recording at near unlimited - I am prob fine as is. Still, they need to say something and do something - they are getting absolutely roasted by everyone and rightfully so. I am hoping soon we see a firmware fix, because at the end of the day, I just care about my camera working to its potential. The crazy thing is Canon has so much going for them, but they keep shooting themselves in the foot. RF mount is already being adapted by folks like Red and it is a mount that can be used for years to come. Their RF lenses are absolutely incredible, with the 50 1.2 RF being the best prime lens I have ever used. Their rumored RF cinema cameras seem amazing and with great price points. And on paper the R5 is the best hybrid mirrorless camera ever made. But yet, here we are because of their bullshit and because of this they once again are losing business. Canon seem to think folks are going to buy the R5 if its too good instead of their cinema cameras , but now they are just losing business all together, with folks avoiding ALL of their cameras in general. I wish I could just shake them and tell them to quit worrying about their damn cinema line, it has absolutely ruined their brand to a large growing group of filmmakers who are very very vocal. This is the same thing apple did when they turned their back on the pro community, hate started to grow and grow by creative folks and their brand took a huge hit with the people that actually influenced who bought their computers and made them popular to begin with - creative folks. Luckily, apple have slowly started to rebuild their image in creative circles with better Macs. So with Canon, they need to realize the people that are going to buy their cinema line are going to buy it no matter what, because they need ND, better DR, XLR, a fan, etc.

i think there`s a guy above the r5 AND cinema eos guys, and he surely owns a pocket calculator. canon is a company that is on the stock market and that rules out that decisions are made just because somebody is too proud or too vain.

Very interesting stuff! I'm a hobbyist Canon shooter myself, but I'm still on the EOS 6D since until now I couldn't find anything that really pushes me towards a new camera. The R5/R6 might be the one that actually catch me. However, after reading all of this, I get doubtful. Besides that I'm an engineer for embedded software / electronics (in automotive) and I would like to share some of my knowledge here. 1. As horshack already pointed out the temperature written in the EXIF might not be the temperature of the main controller, but the one of another chip that's supposed to be a "good"/"reasonable" representation for the inner camera temperature. 2. From our electronics I know that we usually measure 4-5 temperatures from different chips and the differences are quite astonishing sometimes. While the main chip under "heavy duty" might be at around 90°C within a few minutes, peripheral chips show the temperature increase with a (for me) surprisingly high delay of a few minutes. This is partly due to the fact that thermal operations take quite some time, especially if the heat distribution medium is air. This depends on the placing of the chips of course. 3. The issue might not be overheating of the main controller, but of another chip, e.g. of the sensor read out circuit 4. There has been some discussion about maximum temperatures of electronic chips. It is correct that 90°C is still in the comfort zone of most electronic chips. However, you have to take into account that there is a maximum allowed temperature for surfaces is 65°C (Metal) and 85°C (Plastic) due to safety reasons (Source, as an alternative google "safety standard maximum heat surface", Alternative Source). The second source even limits to 55°C for prolonged usage and 60°C for "Short periods only". I saw some videos in which they managed to shoot 4k HQ continuously for hours, by removing the cards from the camera. If I combine the "safety" stuff with this I get to the conclusion that the issue might be the memory card getting too hot in terms of safety regulations. Here's my scenario: I record for let's say 45 minutes, before my CFexpress card is full. I want to switch cards quickly -> I directly open the card slot and pull out a card that has a temperature of ~80-90°C. This is not acceptable by means of safety. The only thing that bothers me then is that the temperature should go down much much faster than what's seen here. Especially, if you look at the "tests" that Jordan from dpreview did, in which he removed cards and battery completely. After that the temperature should go down much faster. Something I can imagine here is that they cannot directly measure the temperature of the memory cards. Due to this they use a formula for calculating cool down times. This formula does not take opening the card slot or changing the card into account. I hope Canon will release detailed information about this. Because even though I'm a stills shooter only, I don't want to be tricked. And I must admit I'm on the edge to switching to Sony, anyway.

Do we need anything new to already know it? ; ) It's embarrassing to say the least... 1992. A further VP of Sony Europe told me to count on it along my career because these practices are part of this industry. 2020. A couple of new novelties today though: digital revolution and internet.

As I look across the room at my Canon bodies and absolute treasure of Canon glass, I'm feeling kind of embarrassed at being a Canon fanboy for so many years. If this kind of behavior is the reward for decades of loyalty then Canon does not understand the lifetime value of a customer! F*ck them. If this test gets confirmed elsewhere I am cancelling my pre-order and getting a Lumix S1H and S1R.

The thing is, if they DO fix this and own up it will be a fantastic camera and many many people will instantly forgive them.

Imagine that Canon boardroom meeting. "Let's create an 8K beast with little RS, RAW video, IBIS, our best auto focus ever... And then cripple it and use overheating to blame it!" "You're a fucking genius, man. LET'S DO IT!"

The temperature reported by the EXIF data more-or-less corresponds with the Chinese heat gun thermometer tests out there as well and it closely resembles the ambient temp of my room at the moment, I am sweltering in 30 degrees heat! I suppose the easy test would be to cool the camera right down in a freezer, quickly take 1 shot then analyse that EXIF data. It is very unlikely the camera is reporting wrong data in the EXIF. It is very basic to get right, even for Canon.

Some cameras shoot RAW and Prores, and some shoot h264 and a few shoot h265. There's lots of bitrates on offer too, 50Mbps, 100Mbps, etc. Some are ALL-I and some are IPB. But how good are they? I couldn't find any comparisons, so I did some myself. What I did was take a few shots from the BM Micro Cinema Camera shot in uncompressed RAW of a tree moving in the wind, and made a single UHD frame by putting them in each corner, like this: Also, they were of different lengths, so I just repeated each one, like this: So we have a test clip that was shot RAW (maybe compressing already compressed footage is easier? I don't know, anyway..), that includes decent movement but isn't some stupid test case that means nothing in real life, that doesn't repeat (because the clips are different lengths), and has some deliberately almost crushed blacks to test the pixelation that h264 and h265 sometimes get in the shadows. Then I exported an uncompressed 10-bit 422 YUV file to use as a reference. After some tests and seeing the file sizes and processing times, I decided to only use the first 12s of the timeline. Then I rendered a bunch of clips, either h264 from Resolve, or h264 and h265 from ffmpeg. I tried rendering h265 from Resolve but had issues, and in this test all the maximum bitrates I tried all created the same size file, so I abandoned that. Common wisdom online is that Resolves h265 export mechanism isn't the best and you should use ffmpeg anyway. Then I compared the compressed clips with the uncompressed reference file, which gives a score called SSIM, which goes from 1 (a perfect match) downwards. Here's the results so far: Here are some observations / thoughts, and some answers to some questions I'd had: In Resolve, H264 seems to top out, as I couldn't get it to export at more than about 400Mbps IPB, but ffmpeg went higher than that quite happily ALL-I h264 doesn't seem to be that different than IPB, at higher bitrates anyway - slightly lower quality and slightly higher file size, but not the 3x I've read around the place Prores isn't that much worse in terms of quality vs compression than h264 or h265, despite being an older codec (although maybe there are versions? I have no idea how prores works.. maybe that's important for this topic?) Different encoders have different levels of quality, so what's in a given camera is likely to differ from these results I guess the real question is, how much h264 do you have to have to equate to Prores? The answer seems to be "about the same bitrate, but probably a little less for an ALL-I codec, and a little less bitrate again if it's an IPB".

It looks so much better now, so it was indeed the workflow that was causing issues. There's still some noise in low light, but the mushiness is gone and the color has life in it. Also, I'm not sure if you slowed it down before or had a frame rate mismatch, but that opening shot of the front gate used to have jerky and unnatural movement but looks normal now. One thing though is that you've got some over exposure that wasn't present before. You might want to adjust the curves in Resolve, or experiment with the raw settings. The shot of the bust at 0:44 in the original is properly exposed, but that shots at 0:48 of the bust in the new one is blown out. But yeah, definitely looks like it was captured in Raw now, which the first video did not.

Shall I pack 10 cans per shoot or just 1?

When I say that I do not care, I mean that I do not care if they put a limitation in the camera if then they remove it. A company is here to make profit. When they "listen" like Fuji and bring you a good feature update, that's not to make you happy or because they are nice guys. Fuji CEO couldn't care less about you, as much as Canon CEO. They do bring that update because they think you are more likely to buy their camera and stay with them if they do it. They do it for your money. Stop being blind, camera manufacturers are not charity. They want to make money, and they happen to have different strategies for doing so. Canon strategy is to cripple lower priced camera to have you buy a more expensive one. Fuji strategy is to bring you software update and pretend they listened to you. I agree that Fuji strategy is much better. Yet for my need, the R5 could be a much better tool than any Fuji or Panasonic on the market. At the end of the day is what TOOL do you need, and which company is making that tool. The tool I need today, a hybrid 50/50 photo/video FF camera with 4K60/120 and IBIS and great AF only exists with Canon appart from their soft limitation. They remove the limitation I buy it. they don't remove it I don't buy it. Nobody is walking over me, I am making a choice based on my need. If you don't buy the R5 in case they fix it despite the fact it was the tool you needed just to punish them, you actually roll over yourself.

It seems not the card or battery but driving the screen to affect more the heat or the timer.... Would be nice to see 8k and 4k 120 if with external screen will get 30min and also no build up of heat while not recording like menu, framing, etc..... it would be already a better proposition

I've only had about 3 hours with the R5 recently and won't have time to dig in much until I just have a body laying around here. Agree with the posters above generally. Theoretically this has nothing to do with the CPU nor the Media (it gets warm and generates heat as well) even, but the accumulation of heat on the sensor itself, which I don't think Canon pushes out via metadata visible to us. It would actually be very hard to monitor specific hot points where heat can do the most damage to the sensor short of taking the camera fully apart and investigating, but even that is a tough one as the guts would be exposed. I imagine without active cooling this particular sensor with all photosites active likely at specific areas behind the sensor are the reason the cap is there, whether it's safe timer based situation or some sort of sensor driven fail safe. The main reason for either of the caps would be to keep it from permanently damaging and/or inducing a degradation of reliability or image quality of the sensor not just in the short term, but long term use. If it's a CPU related heat thing, I'd be pretty shocked. But who knows. Maybe it's a combination of it all. There's lots of reason the more video minded cameras (C500 MK II) have active cooling and this is certainly one of them.

I can understand that but put it this way. It IS just a tool for photography and video, the video side is being crippled (either by lie or by stuff up or both). IF the aim is to make the best video you can, surely you would want the best equipment you can get and IF that best equipment was from a company that lied to protect their OTHER equipment, should they turn around an fix the lie so people DO get the best equipment doing what it was sold to do, what you are saying is you think people should not get it and buy second best? Who is that going to hurt? You, or them (or both)? Human nature says a few will not buy it on principle but plenty of others will and that will include people who would never have considered the camera before. Personally, I would still prefer the Sony A7siii but that is because it suits what I want but I can appreciate what Canon has done in building the R5 while reviling them for crippling it.

I care. And everyone else should too. We shouldn't have an adversarial relationship with a company we're giving our money, nor should we need someone to spend $4,000 on a camera so they can do extensive testing, take it apart, etc. so we know whether or not we're being screwed. We shouldn't accept this!

So I just tried recording externally with R5 screen off. (Using the R5 battery, with no cards in camera) This was indoors in a cool room. I started the recording on the Ninja at 09:14 I stopped the recording at 10:15 Recorded 4K HQ continuously for 1hr and 1 minute with no overheat warning on the R5 screen, and no overheat shutdown through the duration of that hour. I immediately shut camera down, then unplugged the HDMI cable, and removed battery. I then reinserted the battery and put in the CFexpress card, turned camera on and overheat counter said I could record 15 minutes.

That looks really good on my phone. What's the max clip length in 2.5k raw?

Updated video using higher quality export settings workflow: RAW MLV clips from EOS-M ---> CinemaDNG lossless ---> Edited and Graded in Davinci Resolve 16 (free version) --->Final delivery codec for YouTube Export was .mov / PhotoJPEG w/ 250mbps bitrate. Still some noise due to high iso settings (3200+ for the indoor shots) but better than initial export above (h264 codec)

Wheres magic lantern when you need them time to update your canon rep video andrew

Unfortunately the 16-55 does do stepping during a zoom. It is the lens being used in the first video I linked above at time 4:52. That is how the lens maintains a constant aperture, same as my Fuji 10-24 f4 (see my post above, Thursday August 6). I was thinking the 18-55 was doing some sort of ISO stepping, but putting the lens to my ear I can hear faint clicking that sounds like aperture stepping while zooming at above f4. So the new X-T4 firmware may not fix this. The OIS is strong in this lens, great for hand holding in one position. It may be overly strong for panning shots since there is little ease-out when coming to a stop and appears too abrupt. So I pan slowly with OIS on. I have several old 35mm SLR zoom lenses that work best for zoom shots. They have manual aperture rings (no stepping) and are very parfocal so they don't rely on the camera's auto focus. They are also a small fraction of the cost of new Fuji zooms, and use $20 adapters.

I think Andrew should document the entire process, visually and make a documentary about the ethics of companies that manufacture cameras, we already have the case of Canon and Red. Even the comments from the forum could serve as support for the documentary.

You started a shitstorm. It will be hard to hide as such testing can be repeated by anyone with the camera. Well done and thanks for not following the regular flow. IT also gives some hope to get this fixed easily by firmware. Let wait your article being repost until Canon got it in front of their desk.

Yes. I agree. But let's be real. We are dealing with Canon here. I am 99.9999999% sure that will never happen.

Honestly, whether it's incompetence or intentional, the R5 should be reason enough for people to cease supporting this company until they get their shit together. There are companies that value their customers. Reward them instead.

If Canon had been honest it would go something like this: "You may record 30 mins of 4K HQ or 8K once per day because we want you to keep buying Cinema EOS cameras at $15,000!" Honesty is sometimes just as hard to swallow as the lies and deceit. I may never buy another Canon product again after this.

I'm not sure about Pocket 6K, but it's true that Komodo is noisier than Gemini and Helium and doesn't have the same DR: Then again, for $6K, you are getting a "discount Dragon," so no complaints!

Same here with a Fuji 56mm f1.2 It was in mint condition. Purchaser came back about a week after receiving it and said they thought it had been dropped and was damaged/not working properly. Complete BS. Ebay made me take it back. Kept it for a while and then sold it on to a UK dealer who confirmed 'mint'. With ebay, you have to stick to not selling it outside of them or take the risks.

I've never used ebay to sell anything due to stories like yours. I only use Craigslist, only accept cash, and only meet in person. Craigslist has its own long list of problems and you will deal with some of the biggest time wasters ever, but when it's a cash only in person transaction the scammer and returns problems are non existent. I sold my 5DIII, some lenses, and a couple of drones this way.

Those look great! Awesome setting. Some from me, these are all Prores 422 LT