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 p.1 #20 · Canon R5 Mk II - battery issue in cold weather | |
Hi Scott.
Your most recent post pretty much sums up how I feel about our recent purchases of the R5 Mk II's that we took to Churchill recently.
In warm conditions, we strongly prefer the Mk II's, but, at least when not shooting video, the Mk I's have proven to perform consistently better for Polar Bear, Fox, Arctic Hare, Partridge, and even Wolverine pics, at least when the temperature dips below zero.
For shooting video in the cold, I found that the "better/improved" image stabilization of the Mk II's (over the Mk I's), especially when shooting in steady gusts of wind, gave me enough motivation (useable video) to work with my Mk II and its flaky battery recognition/usage.
I learned this the hard way. When I first started having the Mk II not recognize a fully charged battery in freezing temps, I switched to using my old Mk I for my video. It just worked, as I'd come to expect!
However, upon viewing the video playback of the Mk I in this situation, the video was so shaky that it is unusable to me, enabling me to quickly realize that the video that I had been getting from the Mk II was actually amazing in it's auto stabilization capabilities. Arghhh.
A temporary work around for the erroneous "battery error" that I believe we discovered is as follows:
If we are able to get a "cold" R5 Mk II to recognize a fully charged battery (which often requires quite a lot of retries and lots of patience), the Mk II will perform as expected, AS LONG AS IT DOES NOT GO TO SLEEP. So, at least in our recent experience, if you configure the Mk II to stay awake, or you depress either the shutter or the back-button focus button on a regular basis (keeping the Mk II awake), then the erroneous battery error does not seem to appear (at least not as often).
This is obviously not an ideal situation, especially when you are spending hours/days watching Polar Bears lounging around and sleeping while they wait for the ice on Hudson Bay to freeze solidly enough to hold their weight (i.e., when they are consistently sleeping, taking redundant pics/video makes no sense). But, we found this to be a work-around for Canon's obvious firmware defects in the Mk II.
I like your reference to your wife. I have a similar situation. My wife and I shoot identical Canon equipment. We used to shoot different brands, but, being the tech support guy for our team, I found it useful to standardize on one brand with one learning curve. So, starting with the 7D Mk II, moving to the R5 Mk I, and now the R5 Mk II, we shoot on identical hardware, side by side, and end up with a lot of duplicate pics, but also a lot of unique pics (and video), as my wife and I have somewhat different artistic directions with our nature photography. All of this is background for...each time that I request that we upgrade our equipment, I have to approach the banker (my wife) and make a business case for why we need to upgrade AND why we need to keep our current set of equipment, at least until we have proven that the new equipment will really be an asset to our nature photography. I am so very glad that I took our "old" R5 Mk I's (as backup cameras) on our recent trip to Churchill, and that I had not yet sold them. Our R5 Mk I's saved us from hours of fruitless shooting time AND pretty much saved our trip.
That's gonna become a standard part of my "business case" when we next choose to upgrade our equipment, hahaha.
Rick
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