Lensrentals tears down the R5

Lenrentals has done their teardown of the Canon EOS R5.  

I guess the first thing to note is that this looks to be a well-sealed camera with no obvious missing areas and that Canon has done their job.  Roger takes some subtle jabs at all the newly minted thermal engineers on the internet that have weighed in on the R5.

I think the one thing that I see interesting with the R5 tear down is how little space there is inside of the camera body.  Canon certainly has packed it full of electronics and IBIS and well-sealed it to boot.  This looks like a very well engineered camera.

From Roger;

Not much that was surprising. What with the IBIS unit and a more intense chipset, the camera is pretty thoroughly filled up, there are lots of parts and not much air. There’s a new weather sealing method in the lower 2/3 of the camera that seems to give a really, really tight seal. And there we some pretty new flexes which matters not a tiny bit to anyone but me.

The IBIS unit is very compact but well-engineered. There are no tab connections that might be weak points; the sensor is connected to a flat plate around all its edges. That doesn’t mean there can’t be problems, of course, this is a new build, so we won’t know for a year or so.

There seem to be two separate heat sinks, one under the voltage board, another between the main PCB and the sensor assembly, with thermal pads to direct heat to each. At least one of them connects to the tripod plate, which might provide a secondary sink. This is a lot of heat sink compared to most photo cameras, but not even a fraction of what we see in a video camera. What I can’t tell from this is how that heat then gets out of the camera. It’s sure not air circulation.

Given how tightly sealed things are, I’m curious as to where the heat goes to get out of the camera; some further investigation is required there. A lot of people are talking about how the heat should move around inside the camera, slapping some thermal paste around, and doing things to manipulate the heat cut offs.

I'll add a bit in here.  We know from looking at the ISO standards, that Canon has a damned if you and damned if you don't problem with heat generation.  You can't simply efficiently shunt it all to the outside because if you do, you then have to have an even lower operating temperature (less than 50C) to prevent people from actually getting burned by the camera.  We know that internally the temperature gets to around 62-65C before shutting down.  If that temperature equalized to 60C outside, then that would be a huge problem, and people would get harmed.  That's also why video cameras have large cages, usually separate grips, and active cooling - because active cooling removes the heat internally without relying on passive cooling.

Just one note about the workaround and "timer" disabling on the R5.  People are wildly getting this wrong.  I don't know if they have ever written any major control software or even gave thermal management much thought in the past, but it's the rate of increase or decrease of temperature that is important, and also the current value. Unless you know the rate, you can't do any predictions.  What's most likely happening is that buggering the RTC is causing the logic surrounding determining the rate to exception out or determines that the rate is falling rather than increasing and the camera uses false values in its predictive calculation.

Again, I'll re-iterate.  No one and I mean no one on the internet knows why Canon has put in thermal throttling on the R5.  To assume it's simply for product management ie: protecting the cinema line is misleading because not all facts are known.  Only Canon knows, and they haven't been forthcoming on this.  Canon still needs to do two things.  The first thing is to create a whitepaper that deals with the thermal management on the R5, so people just shut up about conspiracy theories, and two, they need to make a heat control setting similar to Sony that just allows the camera to start burning people.

Thank you Roger for tearing apart an R5, I hope no R5's were harmed in the process ;)

• LensRentals