A few days after receiving the a6500 I decided to run a quick test with both cameras to see how long they lasted shooting in 4K before they overheated. It was something I struggled with on the a6300 quite a bit, despite it running the latest firmware, and I was curious if the a6500 was much of an improvement. The a6500 does have the option to keep running after the temperature gets high but that was left off for the duration of this test.

I ran the test with my brother which is why in the video I often said "we". He's more familiar with the technical side of things so his input is greatly appreciated!

There are two notable differences between the cameras' settings during the test. The first being that face detection was left ON on the a6300, which was just an accidental oversight on our part. The second is that image stabilization was left ON on the a6500 (the a6300 doesn't have the option) but since both cameras were on a tripod I doubt it made much of a difference.

Both cameras were set to:

Manual Exposure Movie Mode

XAVC S 4K File Format

30P 100M Record Setting

1/50 Shutter

320 ISO

Automatic White Balance (AWB)

Manual Focus



A rough timeline of notable events: