By Roger Cicala
Published September 10, 2020
Lots and lots of people are talking about Canon R5 heat cut-offs. The discussions range from technical discussions about heat generation, cooling methods, and firmware protocols to strident conspiracy theories.
I only know a little bit about heat:
Electronics give off heat when they’re working.
Heat fries chicken, which is good, and fries electronics, which is bad.
You can get rid of heat by conduction (flowing through nearby materials), convection (circulating through gas or fluids), and radiation (which mostly occurs at high temperatures). We know from the teardown that the R5 is tightly sealed, so we have to figure that convection doesn’t play much of a role.
As a repair and QA oriented person, I hate bricking cameras. So I’m less interested in coaxing the camera into working hotter (see point 2) and more interested in how the heat gets out. When we did the teardown of the R5 we saw some metal heat sink / transfer plates that
would...
Continue reading...