arbitrage wrote:
To follow up on my question from last evening, I was watching the Gerald Undone 3hr livestream using the R6/R5 that answered a lot of interesting questions/theories about how the temp warnings and video modes perform.
What was of interest is that once he hit the heat limit in 4K60(HQ) you could immediately switch down to 4K30 and shoot forever with the heat warning disappearing. You could also shoot 4K60 (low quality, line skipped) for ever if shooting externally or just streaming as he was doing without recording BUT the heat warning stays on and shows 0:00 for record time. Supposedly this is because if you start recording internal it will shut off at the heat limit in 4K60 (low quality). So that sort of tells me the camera may keep showing the heat warning even though it will never shutdown your lower video mode or stills mode. But it is also odd to me that 4K30 gets rid of the heat warning so not sure why in stills the camera would bother showing the heat warning. Maybe if your video setting was set to 4K60 or 8K (even though you weren't shooting video) it showed the warning thinking that is what you would want to shoot? Just a wild theory?
Hope Andrew can clarify if the camera actually shut down after the heat icon came on in stills mode. I read through his subsequent replies and it sounded more like it was just the icon showing up and then maybe the battery dying (and being really hot)??
Heat dissipation is all about temperature difference. The bigger the temperature difference between a warm object and its cooler environment the faster it will transfer heat to the environment. It is probable that at a given (high) operating temperature the camera generates heat at or below the equilibrium rate when lower IQ video modes are used, but not in the higher IQ modes. The equilibrium rate depends on both the camera temperature and the air temperature. If the environment is hot enough I'm sure it would shut down in any mode after some period of time.
It's normal practice to have temperature sensors built into the processor and other ICs in the camera, probably including the image sensor. Heat shutoff limits would typically depend on the circuit design limits and on image quality, which deteriorates as temperature increases. The design limits are "hard" limits, meaning that exceeding them will compromise the operating lifetime of the circuits. The IQ limits are "soft". Exceeding them means noisier images.
