Blog

Hard­ly a month after its release, the Canon EOS R5 gets its first firmware update. Start­ing today, the firmware ver­sion 1.1.0 is avail­able for down­load on the Canon Europe web­site. Besides bug fix­es in the menu, a fur­ther improve­ment of the image sta­bi­liza­tion for “cer­tain RF lens­es”, an improve­ment of the access time for “cer­tain CFex­press cards” and the con­nec­tiv­i­ty for FTP trans­fers, the most impor­tant and most hoped-for update is cer­tain­ly the

Improvement of the recording time until the camera overheats.

Although the over­heat­ing prob­lem has not been com­plete­ly solved with the new firmware, the record­ing time has been sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased. In addi­tion, the cam­era is soon­er avail­able for video record­ing after a shut­down due to overheating. 

I have just checked the new behav­ior by myself. With the old firmware, I could record about 16 min­utes in 8K RAW until the cam­era pow­ered down due to over­heat­ing. The new firmware now allows 20 min­utes record­ing time. Half an hour lat­er, 5 min­utes of record­ing time were avail­able again.

Jor­don Drake of DPRe­view has already test­ed the behav­ior with the new firmware in detail:

The pos­si­ble record­ing time in his test in 8K IPB has been increased from about 20 to 25 min­utes with the new firmware, the record­ing time in 4K HQ IPB even from 30 to 40 min­utes. Even more impor­tant is that with the new firmware the cam­era is now faster ready for the next shoot.

In 8K, 10 min­utes of record­ing time are avail­able after 30 min­utes (pre­vi­ous­ly 5 min­utes) and after 1 hour there are already 15 min­utes (pre­vi­ous­ly 10) avail­able. In 4K HQ, after one hour of cool­ing-down, 20 min­utes of record­ing time are now avail­able (pre­vi­ous­ly 15).

Much more excit­ing and for me, who only wants to record short clips casu­al­ly at the most time, more impor­tant is the improved behav­ior with short clips, which Gor­don Leign test­ed exten­sive­ly in his video:

He took one 30-sec­ond clip in 4K-120 at 30-sec­ond inter­vals and turned the cam­era off for 30 sec­onds between each clip. With the orig­i­nal firmware, he could record a total of 22x 30 sec­ond clips, or 11 min­utes of film, until the EOS R5 pow­ered down due to over­heat­ing. With the new firmware 1.1.0., this behav­ior has now been dra­mat­i­cal­ly improved. Now the cam­era allowed the record­ing of a total of 96 clips, i.e. 48 min­utes of film, until it shut down.

Anoth­er impor­tant aspect he men­tions, is the fact that the cam­era cools down fastest when it is com­plete­ly switched off via the main switch. Any action in the menus or tak­ing pho­tos will sig­nif­i­cant­ly delay the cool­ing down. Even pure pho­tog­ra­phy can over­heat the cam­era. I expe­ri­enced this myself dur­ing my vis­it to the zoo last week­end (using the old firmware).

Although I did­n’t do any film­ing, after about 2 hours and about 300 shots (part­ly in fast con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing mode) the over­heat­ing warn­ing appeared on the screen and the pos­si­ble movie record­ing time was dis­played as 0:00 min­utes. How­ev­er, I had left the cam­era switched on dur­ing the whole time and despite the warn­ing, I was able to con­tin­ue tak­ing pic­tures with­out any prob­lems. But the cool down time was also improved with the firmware update, as Jor­don Drake had already found out. I’m curi­ous, if the over­heat­ing warn­ing with the new firmware will con­tin­ue to appear with exten­sive plain photography.

With the orig­i­nal firmware, sev­er­al testers have made the obser­va­tion, that the cool­ing time of the cam­era was obvi­ous­ly rigid­ly set by a timer and the out­side tem­per­a­ture was large­ly ignored. Accord­ing to Gor­don Laign, Canon told him, that the EOS R5 uses a total of three ther­mal sen­sors, two mea­sur­ing the inter­nal and one the exter­nal tem­per­a­ture. Canon has now changed the eval­u­a­tion of these sen­sors, they are read out more often and the exter­nal sen­sor is now appar­ent­ly tak­en into account to a greater extent.

To ver­i­fy this, Gor­don Laign used his refrig­er­a­tor. In his test, the EOS R5 with the new firmware pre­vi­ous­ly took 32 min­utes at room tem­per­a­ture before full record­ing time was avail­able again. In a sec­ond test, he put the cam­era in his fridge and now after only 12 min­utes it was ready for the full record­ing time again.

I have already installed the firmware update. The process was (as usu­al from Canon) with­out problems.

Some­what irri­tat­ing was the fact, that in the begin­ning the update process stopped at 0% for about 60 sec­onds - I had already feared a crash - but then it went through with­out prob­lems. In total the update took about 6 1/2 min­utes. The tech­ni­cal progress of the cam­era can be seen in the size of the firmware: The firmware file of the EOS 5R is 45MB in size, the one of the 5DS R need­ed only 32MB.