Canon News has discovered an interesting patent that identifies external accessory based cooling for a 1 series camera body. While this camera shown in the illustrations is clearly a 1 series camera, it does not appear to be the 1DX Mark III body. It's highly possible that this was one of the early attempts to manage heat in the upcoming 1DX Mark III that was later abandoned.
The goal of this patent is to find a way to cool down the camera without increasing the size of the camera, as explained from the patent application;
Conventionally, even in a digital camera, heat generation in an image sensor and an image processing circuit has become a problem due to an increase in pixels of the image sensor and a high frame rate of a moving image. In addition, the camera itself is required to be miniaturized, and there are few parts that release heat. For this reason, there is a limit to heat countermeasures by using heat transfer members that have been conventionally used to diffuse heat to the respective members and making them uniform.
For this reason, forced air cooling using a fan or the like has been proposed, but if it is built in, the image pickup apparatus itself may become large.
Canon explains in the patent application that with a combination of creative engineering around the viewfinder, and a fan-based accessory cap for the optical viewfinder, they can manage to provide cooling to the camera body itself.
Using an accessory cap for the viewfinder makes sense because when shooting video (which is when much of the heat would be generated), you wouldn't be using the optical viewfinder anyways.
Maybe this is actually a thing, and to cool down a completely sealed camera like the 1 series, Canon has to get creative.
An interesting concept that could be applied to EF and RF cameras in the future as video resolutions and frame rates rise. As long as they can keep the same weather sealing properties, having a viewfinder fan sound like a great idea.
I have a friend who literally put a ziploc bag of ice on top of his A6300 to keep it from overheating.
Agreed. I wish there was, for example, EOS RPse (EOS RP Stills Edition). No video features at all, but even lower price (close to xxD series).
Do you really not realize that a mirrorless stills camera is functionally a video camera? An EOS RP without video capabilities would physically be no different and no cheaper to make than one that captures video. You still need all the processing power to capture a moving image from the sensor and feed it to the EVF or the rear screen. Making an EOS RP that just takes stills would just be handicapping a normal EOS RP by omitting the software that allows for video capture. It would be no cheaper to manufacture.
I don't get why you people complain so much. The price of adding video features to a camera nowdays is negligible. There are no separate parts (other than the record button), recording video is essentially a software feature, not a hardware one.
If you don't want to shoot video, don't press the button.
Peltier cooling would make so much more sense. Fan based cooling implies openings for ventilation with all the resultant implications for dust/dirt/moisture ingress. Even if it were implemented as sealed ducts, there's obvious potential for the ducts to be clogged by dust, and the bulk of the camera would necessarily be increased. Add to this the potential for vibrations from the fan reducing image resolution, plus the fact that in high ambient temperatures it would be considerably less effective.