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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

At least some such cameras were limited to less than 30 minutes, because EU tariffs classified something that could record for more than 30 minutes as a video camera, which had a higher import duty. Source: https://www.borrowlenses.com/blog/video-recording-limits-in-...

Having the camera overheat seems like a clumsy way to do it, though. The time limit would depend on ambient temperature and manufacturing variance in the heat sink.

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That EU tariff was scrapped some time in around July 2019. The R5 was never sold with such a recording limit (4k 30fps has always been unlimited even with the overheating issues and old firmware). Some new cameras are still being sold with the 30 minute limit so you have to watch out for that if you are looking at another camera.

Not true, the r5 and r6 come with a 30min hard limit despite tariffs no longer being relevant. This is besides the overheating issue so when it you manage for it to not overheat, it will stop at 29:99

This is not specific to Canon by the way, even smaller cameras like the newest RX-100s from Sony have limitations on taking high resolution videos because of overheating.

Wonder if you have a link to this. I've tried researching it before, and all I could find was internal discussions of the intention to remove the tariff, no codification into legislation.

The legislation outlining the tariffs in its version from 2006 [0, p. 577] lists the import tariff for a “video camera recorder” at 14%, whereas the version from last year [1, p. 601] lists it as “Free”. This seems to be the result of a WTO agreement [2].

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=uris...

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv%...

Yeah actually did look into it a few days ago and couldn't find a definitive source on the current tarrifs. The best I could find was actually the article to borrowlenses that the commenter linked above which mentions that "This is all supposedly going to get phased out starting in July of 2019".

Here's my previous post about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436809

This limitation applies to my Sony A6000 too, thankfully there is a software hack to unlock an unlimited recording time.

https://github.com/ma1co/OpenMemories-Tweak

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