What’s next for the Canon EOS R5 and Canon EOS R6?

[scyrene]

Welcome to the internet in 2020, where:
- the R5 is DOA before shipping because it has limitations on features that no other competitor even offers yet
- the R6 is DOA because its only 20megapixels and that's useless for everything (its a little known fact that no images were taken, and certainly not published, before the first 20+MP sensor was invented a few years ago)
- the new Sony a technological powerhouse no one could have dreamed of, and 12mp is adequate for most photographic uses

If I could like this more than once I would!

 

[Stu_bert]

Maybe Canon will disable or limit some of the computational features going on during photo and/or video record. From what I understand the new bodies get hot when doing photos alone as the processors are really working overtime doing all the real time scene/face/eye recognition. Apparently the algorithm was done to search for and/or track many objects besides just human faces/eyes/animal faces/animal eyes.

If it's doing all this in video too, it could be a good thing to have the option at least to use a more basic form of tracking. Maybe a lowered bit rate too, or at least the option to.

Only so much you can do in a rubberized bodied camera.

I would think a good solution (if you can't implement a cooling fan/vents) would be to implement the heat sink into the tripod screw and have an optional finned heat sink you screw onto the bottom. Or maybe a hotshoe solution. But what do I know.

The R gets warm which is fine so long as it keeps producing pictures and the heat isn’t introducing additional noise.... No different from your PC / Mac / Smartphone doing the same when you start to push them. But if they exceed their thermal tolerances which might break some aspect of the hardware then they either throttle back and do things slower or they shut down. The R5 is doing more than the R even when shooting stills, I agree. But I would be surprised if they’ve not designed a body that could cope with that.

The high end video features - well it seems they underestimated the negative reaction. Too few people going, 8K for 20 mins, great.... too many going it’s broke.

Disabling features which put it on par or better than its competitors would be admitting defeat, no? Can’t see a company wanting to do that’s, let alone a Japanese one.

 

[Bert63]

They started shipping yesterday. If you didn't get a shipping email, you weren't in. Mine's getting delivered today from BH and the grip's coming Friday.

I ordered corporate, didn't get an email about anything, and my grip shipped yesterday so I don't know what to think. If I missed the boat I'm going to cancel and wait.

 

[davidhfe]

Also, wow, that EOS thread about a heat sink. A heat sink is a device that you throw (sink) waste heat into so that it can be dissipated. The R5 has a huge heat sink—the mag alloy body. It doesn't matter how big the spreader is on the back of the PCB as long as it can can transfer that heat from the processor and sensor to the body as fast as it's generated. Given the 20-30 minute recording time, I'd say that's the sink (body) reaching it's capacity. This sounds very different from, say, a PC that's got inadequate cooling. Not sure about the lack of thermal compound—that picture was tiny—I suppose it could be an issue but only if it's heat transfer that's the problem not heat dissipation. But you don't put cooling fins (like you'd see on a CPU) on a thermal setup like this because fins are used to dissipate not transfer heat.

The problem* here seems to be that the sink (mag alloy) can't effectively dissipate the heat generated once it's full. This is why the R6 overheats faster despite processing half the information as the R5. No mag allow to sink heat to! I feel like folks are looking at this and saying "gosh it's not designed like my PC canon is dumb" without a pinch of thought about what's going on:

- Rate the sensor and processor generates heat. Can be mitigated by firmware (more efficient or less use of hardware) to some degree but there are also just the realities of the TDP of these components.
- Is the heat from the sensor and processor being pulled away quickly enough to prevent them from overheating (stability, eventually hardware damage).
- What do you do with that heat—where does it sink to?
- Once it's been sinked, how do you dissapate heat from the sink. PCs have big ass sinks with hundreds of fins because they're paired with big ass fans to remove the heat from the sink.

Where the problem in that stack lies greatly affects what Canon can do. If the entire thing is working as anticipated, I don't see how you fix* it w/o re-engineering the entire body.

In a perfect, perfect world there's a defect in a batch of Digics or sensors that's causing them to create more heat than their spec'd TDP. The delay is to fix that mfg problem but wow that's idle speculation for the ages. This is starting to feel an awful lot like "Canon is re-working the 5D4 to add better 4K codecs!" and folks need to get their own expectations in order.

*I am still not 100% convinced there is a "problem" here except for Canon's marketing group which headlined 8K and then said "uhhh well sorta" in conjunction with not putting the bodies in the hands of anyone except explorer.

 

[Stu_bert]

Welcome to the internet in 2020, where:
- the R5 is DOA before shipping because it has limitations on features that no other competitor even offers yet
- the R6 is DOA because its only 20megapixels and that's useless for everything (its a little known fact that no images were taken, and certainly not published, before the first 20+MP sensor was invented a few years ago)
- the new Sony a technological powerhouse no one could have dreamed of, and 12mp is adequate for most photographic uses

Welcome to Internet in 2020, where negativity sells clicks and views and common sense should be left behind. Conflict makes money...

Don’t set up a YT channel - you’re views are too sensible, only a few will watch... like moths most seem to be attracted to the bright lights of the influencers... who just want you to keep watching whatever they preach so it makes them money. To be fair, supply and demand - enough people must like it and the influencers probably make more money in a month then I do in a year

 

[Max TT]

They will squeeze every single dollar from their customer base who are trapped sitting on thousands of dollars of EF glass. Its all about drip feeding its customers. If they give you a camera that doesnt overheat in 2020, what can we give you in 2021-22!

 

[Bert63]

The new h265 codec is also part of this problem. That codec creates lots of heat, yes there is overheating in 8k but that h265 shit will be the death of cameras and computers. Give the camera motion jpeg and a mp4 h264 and life will be well. Photo shooters should also be concerned with photo battery’s life. It’s not looking good. I hope they get this all sorted. I want canon to succeed and crush it.

I encode using H265 all the time on my PC and it's no big deal. I don't know why you say it's going to be the death of computers - that doesn't make any sense at all.

It's actually a decent codec if you're looking for decent quality and small file size.

 

[Danglin52]

I rush job to get it out before Sony's new camera , and they lose custom to them maybe .

I do not believe this was a rush job. I do not understand why they are even comparing to the A7sIII - completely different target markets. As Jared Polen said, the R5 "walks all over the Sony for stills" but there is this focus on comparing completely different segments of the market. I think the only mistake Canon made ws the emphasis on 8K. I should have been ...... and btw, we now can capture short segments of 8k".

 

[Joules]

They will squeeze every single dollar from their customer base who are trapped sitting on thousands of dollars of EF glass. Its all about drip feeding its customers. If they give you a camera that doesnt overheat in 2020, what can we give you in 2021-22!

 

[Bert63]

I honestly don't know if the overheating would ever effect me. I am primarily a still shooter that also shoots some occasional video when traveling, etc. Most of my clips don't exceed 8 to 10 minutes. But, I guess it would be nice to know that longer clips were a possibility if I needed them.

I am interested to see what Canon might bring to the table to see if it will be a hardware fix or a firmware fix.

I will make the change to RF glass at some point, but being stuck home during the pandemic means I don't have an urgent need to upgrade today. The iPhone 11 Pro, Canon 5D Mark III, and a GoPro are more than enough to document the four walls of my house.

My lovely wife and I were just having this discussion. Pretty much the same scenario. I have camera bodies to last until the end of time and plent of EF and EF-S glass to get me through a nuclear winter - this was purely a FUN buy because I love my R so much.

I have obviously missed the first wave of bodies and maybe that's a good thing because I hate recalls. I'm thinking I'll cancel the body and just order the 100-500L instead. It'll serve me well chasing birds around the back yard.

 

[unfocused]

if it’s anything like most of the engineering groups I’ve worked with the conversations are “We told marketing there were thermal limits to these modes why did they publish them as headline features?” And “Great now we have to clean up their mess”

Meanwhile the conversation in marketing is going like this: "Did it not occur to anyone in engineering that customers might want to actually, you know, use the video features they put in the camera."

 

[Bert63]

To be fair, if the screwdriver were accompanied by a massive ad campaign touting it's ability to drive nails people might have a right to complain.

I think the problem is not that it overheats, it's that Canon went out of their way to market the video capabilities of the camera, overshadowing the stills aspects, and failed to anticipate the concerns that are now being raised as a direct outgrowth of their own marketing. (And, I don't shoot video by the way.)

I never saw any 'massive ad campaign, I saw a bunch of influencers grab one item out of a list of leaked specs and drive it into the ground over and over again until somehow it became this unicorn of a perfect feature.

 

[Danglin52]

I'm fine with a recall, and Canon will handle it the right way. What I'm not fine with is companies that will put out a product with a defect, and the ignore the issue. And even after the problem is acknowledged only offer a firmware update that merely hide the problem by removing the warning... I'm looking at you Sony.

It is not a defect, it was a design decisions. The camera has firmware that both detects, warns and then deals with the situation. It is a defect when they don't know about the issue, ship the product, and then have to create an emergency fix to make it usable beyond spec. None of this is happening, just a lot of noise around people that want more than what was promised. I don't think Canon ever said you should shoot a full length motion picture with this camera. Look at the size, cost, and weight of a camera that could deliver what some people are requesting. I know it is not something that I want.

 

[jam05]

Or they can go the sony way by changing this line in the firmware:

#DEFINE shutdown_temp 85
into
#DEFINE shutdown_temp 105

Jokes aside this is the way sony addressed overheating complaints in the past:

"One of the major improvement has been seen on the A6300. With the new firmware it takes more than double the time before it overheats in comparison to the older firmware."

"Sony has now fixed the problem with firmware version 1.01 for the Sony Alpha A9. In the change log it simply says 'This utility updates the camera firmware to version 1.01 and improves the overheating warning functionality."

Sony also has a Auto Pwr OFF Temp (HIGH) which allows the camera to continue to operate while in the overheat state, until it completely fails. Being that this is what many Sony operators immediately claim should be the setting when testing their cameras is proof that most know about and or use it.

 

[davidhfe]

I encode using H265 all the time on my PC and it's no big deal. I don't know why you say it's going to be the death of computers - that doesn't make any sense at all.

It's actually a decent codec if you're looking for decent quality and small file size.

Don't worry folks, H266 has already been announced. In 3 years people will complain that VVC/H266 is destroying their computers and why can't we just use H265. Or even better, lets go back to H262. Heck, you could play MPEG-2 DVDs on a potato chip.

 

[koenkooi]

I am pretty confident that if the second batch isn't shipping until November, the small amount they sent out now will be recalled. There are COUNTLESS stories that camera stores only received between 20-30% of their order request.[..]

4 R5s received for 30 preorders where I ordered. I wasn’t in the lucky group.

 

[Bert63]

best thing is cancel your order and take the wait and see approach.

Seeing as how the first wave of shipments sailed without me onboard, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Leave an order outstanding for months? I'd go nuts. Patience is not a character trait I'm familiar with.

 

[SecureGSM]

Also, wow, that EOS thread about a heat sink. A heat sink is a device that you throw (sink) waste heat into so that it can be dissipated. The R5 has a huge heat sink—the mag alloy body. It doesn't matter how big the spreader is on the back of the PCB as long as it can can transfer that heat from the processor and sensor to the body as fast as it's generated. Given the 20-30 minute recording time, I'd say that's the sink (body) reaching it's capacity. This sounds very different from, say, a PC that's got inadequate cooling. Not sure about the lack of thermal compound—that picture was tiny—I suppose it could be an issue but only if it's heat transfer that's the problem not heat dissipation. But you don't put cooling fins (like you'd see on a CPU) on a thermal setup like this because fins are used to dissipate not transfer heat.

The problem* here seems to be that the sink (mag alloy) can't effectively dissipate the heat generated once it's full. This is why the R6 overheats faster despite processing half the information as the R5. No mag allow to sink heat to! I feel like folks are looking at this and saying "gosh it's not designed like my PC canon is dumb" without a pinch of thought about what's going on:

- Rate the sensor and processor generates heat. Can be mitigated by firmware (more efficient or less use of hardware) to some degree but there are also just the realities of the TDP of these components.
- Is the heat from the sensor and processor being pulled away quickly enough to prevent them from overheating (stability, eventually hardware damage).
- What do you do with that heat—where does it sink to?
- Once it's been sinked, how do you dissapate heat from the sink. PCs have big ass sinks with hundreds of fins because they're paired with big ass fans to remove the heat from the sink.

Where the problem in that stack lies greatly affects what Canon can do. If the entire thing is working as anticipated, I don't see how you fix* it w/o re-engineering the entire body.

In a perfect, perfect world there's a defect in a batch of Digics or sensors that's causing them to create more heat than their spec'd TDP. The delay is to fix that mfg problem but wow that's idle speculation for the ages. This is starting to feel an awful lot like "Canon is re-working the 5D4 to add better 4K codecs!" and folks need to get their own expectations in order.

*I am still not 100% convinced there is a "problem" here except for Canon's marketing group which headlined 8K and then said "uhhh well sorta" in conjunction with not putting the bodies in the hands of anyone except explorer.

you seems to overlook an elephant in the room: IBIS
sensor assembly has to stay mobile and light. So the heat either to be first absorbed by magnesium alloy body and then extracted either via lens mount throat, peltier element inbuilt into the back of the camera or Dissipate into the bottom plate..

 

[unfocused]

I never saw any 'massive ad campaign, I saw a bunch of influencers grab one item out of a list of leaked specs and drive it into the ground over and over again until somehow it became this unicorn of a perfect feature.

I was referring to Canon's pre-release publicity efforts, which were very heavily weighted to the video features. In fact there was much whining on this very forum about how all the talk was about video specs and nothing about stills.

 

[jam05]

There doesn't need to be a recall. That's stupid. It doesn't have a fan. There are a few options. And not do what Sony did and raise the threshold so that it operates while overheated. Nor use a Auto Pwr OFF Temp (HIGH). In a few weeks there will be third party devices and Canon's own adapter.. I believe this is what the slow down is. I have already called Tilta, and communicated with SmallRig. Tiltas unit will be available mid - late August. I have yet to hear from SmallRig. Myself will order the R cage and design my on small fan attachment and or peltier cooling with USB control similar to that of Tilta unit.