Sony A6500 V.s. A6300 Overheating Test

The above video shows a very important feature that Sony didn’t really mention (and many were very interested in knowing about the new A6500 – how long can you shoot 4K with it without overheat.

Overheating has been a serious problem with Sony cameras – the small body with all the advanced electronics + 4K shooting from a relatively large sensor makes the camera hot – very hot – and when it reaches a certain level is simply shots down. How quickly this will happen depends on on all sort of different factors including the ambient temperature.

The guys from Newsshooter.com shot this (rather boring we agree) video of using an a6500 one the left and a6300 on the right 4K video and see what happens.

As it turned out – in the environment that the room was in the a6300 lasted about 12:30 while the a6500 lasted the entire 30 min – very impressive – we are surprised that Sony did not emphasise this when the camera was announced.

Here is what Sony had to say to the Dan Chung from Newsshooter:

“The new a6500 solves this with a new ‘Auto PWR OFF Temp’ setting. When set at ‘High’ it allows the camera to continue recording all the way up to its 29 min 50 second limit. According to Sony reps you can then start to record again immediately for another half hour in normal conditions. If you then start recording again a third time Sony make no promises about how long it will record for.”

The way this looks – as one of the commentators remarked is: “Simply put, Sony did not fix the problem at all, they just now have a switch that turn off any security put in place when the sensor start to heat like crazy”.

Update: another video about the A6500 from the same Sony event in London

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvpyZhKc1bE[/youtube]

You can read about some of the other improvements of the a6500 in our original article.

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Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.