Canon Patent Application: External Cooler for Small Mirrorless

In this patent application, Canon describes an external cooler to a small mirrorless camera.  With the bigger cameras, there is more ability to shunt heat away and cool the camera, but this is not the case as you make the camera smaller.

This patent application indicates that they are using the USB port on the side of the camera which is connected to the internal heat transfer heat sink.  This allows the heat to transfer to the port and allows the external cooler to cool the internals of the camera.

Most likely a bit clumsy for handheld operation - but if you have the camera on a tripod, it's most likely an adequate solution.

Interestingly this device could be used on any device - phone, camera, etc to cool the internals of a device. It probably wouldn't work well unless the device though was built with that intention.

From the patent application;

There is a demand for an externally connected electronic device that can be connected to an image pickup device and is used for cooling.
In order to solve the above problems, the electronic device according to the present invention has an interface unit including a connection unit that can be attached to the external device by connecting to an interface terminal provided in the external device, and a heat transfer unit. The heat transfer unit and the heat radiating unit are connected to the interface unit, and the interface unit is in the opposite direction to the external device when the interface unit is connected to the external device. It is a feature.

Japan Patent Application 2022-021539