Canon Interview: The R5 and R6 overheating

CiniD has sat down with Katsuki Nagai-San, Canon Europe's Product Management Director of Image Communication Business.

I think the first thing to talk about is this, the cripple hammer to product the CINI lineup.  I've always hated this internet borne theory because it doesn't even pass a 10-mile high sniff test.  Who's going to decide to purchase a hybrid stills camera over a professional video camera anyways? Those are two separate markets, the cameras are designed differently and met to handle the needs of two different industries.  The fact that you have some sites push the video narrative of ILC's without really focusing on this - I think is disingenuous to the community at large.

This is an accusation we’ve seen before which belongs on the conspiracy theory pile. It is simply not a sensible business idea as users are more likely to switch to competitor systems than buy a much more expensive camera to get a certain feature.

Canon has several times addressed this and even the CEO of Canon has answered this accusation, but the internet trolls on.  This should be common sense to anyone really.  Companies look at the target market and evaluate it.  That's what companies do.  

It is important that we evaluate the primary customer for each product and decide what features would be required by that typical user. We do not ‘cripple’ our cameras, our aim is always to focus the product better to the typical user.

So can we put this cripple hammer stupidity to rest? Yes, for at least the next 2 hours.

Now about the overheating.

We have been a big proponent that there is more going on than what some internet engineers are taking into account, and one of them has been the fact that you simply cannot grip securely an object over the temperature of 48C for very long.  You can and will burn, even a relatively low increase of that into the mid 50's can cause some serious harm to your skin and severe pain.  Severe pain is not something I want in my stills camera.

If you want to read again what we wrote on this subject, and by all the internet findings, I haven't seen much in the way of new materials that states that this is any different than what I wrote a month ago.  Go over here.

Canon's Katsuki Nagai-San states very clearly that low-temperature burns are something Canon is taking into consideration.

Holding a very warm object for an extended period has the potential to result in what is known as low temperature burns. Secondary is to protect the internal components of the camera from the overheating. We limit how hot the external body of the camera can get to protect users, which is one of the causes of overheat shutdown. Some heat management must also be applied to ensure the camera continues to operate.

Even with this, I do think that Canon needs controls that allow the camera to exceed the thermal limits they have decided on, for those that use it in a cage and what not, and that are quite aware of the fact that they are running it hotter than it should.  It should also be noted, as Roger from lensrentals pointed out, that DC to DC voltage converters get less efficient with heat.  This can end up causing thermal runaway in a sealed system.  The higher the temperature, the less efficient, the less efficient the more heat produced.  And so on.  It's something we never thought of but it does make some logical sense.

Read the rest of the interview over on CiniD.

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