Emmanuel Plakiotis Major Player

Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Athens, Greece Posts: 344

When shooting in Buenos Aires, I had many instances of camera overheating. I was using the camera all day, for shooting pics and videos of everything I encountered, in a documentary fashion. It is very useful, because you don't have to carry both a still camera and a camcorder. The other benefit is that almost nobody understands that you shoot video, assuming your rig is only for pics.



Here are a few observations:



I also believe it has to do more with other factors besides environmental temperature, but couldn't figure out a pattern. At least in my camera the 50p argument is not valid. It overheats equally in 25p mode.

It seems to overheat less in auto mode. Maybe because the sensor is never overexposed as it can happen if you shoot in manual.

There is no clear pattern when overheating occurs, but if it happens once, probably it will repeat soon. There were days that went on without one instance of overheating and others that I had to turn the camera on/off every 20min or less. Turning the camera on/off seems to cure instantly the problem, but not solving it.

I found out, that opening the battery lid and taking out the battery for a few moments prolonged the intervals between overheating. I thought of changing the battery when overheating occurred, but never really tried it.

Sometimes I just keep shooting with the red sign on. Because it was not a planned work and I had only two batteries, on location reviewing was out of the question, I never figured out if the footage was recorded or not in those instances.