Hardware Hacker: R5 + Heat pads = Unlimited 8K

Petapixel covered Yifan Gu’s geeky blog post providing a how-to on how to thermally modify your Canon R5 to shoot 8K without the normal time limits. Yes, you’ll nuke your warranty, but you’ll do so gloriously – not like all those lame people who merely let condensation collect in their camera bags.

You’ll need some tools, and probably about 40 steps not mentioned in the “step-by-step” blog post comprised of just a few pages. At least that’s what Roger Cicala made it seem like when he and a colleague opened up one of theirs over at Lensrentals [Ed.: Maybe they’re just whiners].

In any case, when shooting the modified R5, with heat pads essentially providing a thermal conduit from the hot bits to the back of the camera case, Gu was able to get unlimited recording in cool temperatures, and longer time at room temperature. The warmer performance was also made essentially unlimited with the adding of a fan on the back. This is interesting because Cicala’s supposition was that the heat problem was most likely due to there not being any obvious way for the heat to move out of the camera guts – the very problem Gu may have solved.

The heat transfer starts