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Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

"Matt also believes that Canon could have designed the camera to dump the heat toward the bottom of the camera and then sold a separate base attachment for videographers that provides vastly extended recording times."

Seriously, this. I wonder if they could make the area around threaded screw on the bottom for attaching to tripods a heat spreader. These are usually made out of metal already, and have to be structurally sound for the camera to be attached there. If the attached base was a block of aluminum or copper, it could probably suck the heat out of there.

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I doubt they would just dump heat to the threaded base for a few reasons:

1) Heated metal expands, and different heated metals expand at different rates, changing tolerances for threaded mounts and possibly causing thermal locking and/or looseness.

2) Managing heat over time is about diffusing the dangerously high temps (e.g. near boiling) to areas large enough stay safe for human contact while also being exposed to air to shed that heat. A pinch point threaded mount under a rubberized/plastic body will absorb thermal shocks (quick use) but will equalize to very close to the junction temperature of the processor over time, aided only slightly by the other parts of the camera that are poor thermal conductors. Basically, that spot would become a burn risk.

See ASTM C1055 - https://www.astm.org/Standards/C1055.htm

The short version is that you need to keep things under 60C/140F if there's a chance a person could touch it.

Exactly right. It is important to understand why things are designed the way they are before we go about challenging established engineering principles.

https://www.electronics-cooling.com/2016/09/surface-temperat...

Whenever I read something like this, I think how despite the rise of the smartphone camera that's good for 99.9% of people, it still seems like there's still a lot of opportunity to improve traditional point and shoot digital cameras. It almost makes you wish that some of these companies (Canon, Sony, etc) put some more research into some sort of skunkworks that could completely reimagine the form of the camera in a way that would greatly benefit the user.

In the end, it comes down to the optics.

The (incredible) tiny sensors in smartphones aren't big enough to get past a certain fidelity. Combined with very small working ranges on the lenses and the limits are pretty hard. Hence the three lens set-ups now on the newer models.

Granted, the optics here are just the coolest things. 'Digital' lenses are some very slick stuff and the engineering is the best you can get.

But in the end, you just need longer working distances and bigger lenses. The optical physics are just the laws you have to deal with, same as Newton had to. No amount of engineering can get past them.

One thing they could do is to put a 'periscope'-like mount on the side, have the sensors slide up and down inside, and slot in a few lenses based on the optics. But the mechanics and likely slow speed of such a device would wear-out very fast and would be very susceptible to drops and dings.

Eh. Modern phone cameras produce a kind of synthesized picture composed by machine learning, based on what you point at. That seems to be the direction of travel. E.g. super-resolution based on multiple samples over time and integrated backwards to eliminate blur.

I honestly want the large camera manufacturers to start tapping into the computational photography realm. That tech, with their amazing sensors and glass, would produce some amazing results.

There was a post here on HN a few months ago where someone went into how the camera manufacturers are going to be challenged by phone manufacturers coming up with better and better algorithms to enhance the quality of pictures that are bumping up against physical limits such as lens size and pixel density.

Edit: Here's [0] the link to the article.

[0] https://photographylife.com/smartphone-vs-camera-industry

It doesn't have to be in the camera. You can do that in post with the raw files.

Generally no, because a RAW file records only the total amount of exposure per "pixel".

Full computational photography requires exposure per pixel over time (so something like a "stacked RAW" needs to be invented) combined with synced data from accelerometer/gyroscope/etc. for deconvolution.

I honestly don't. I wish they'd spend less time developing increasingly bloated and buggy camera software features and more time on simple improvements ( like exposure bracketing using ISO instead of just shutter speed )

It's still a '99% of people' solution.

For the remaining people that really do want/need that last 1%, ML doesn't work. You can't infer data that does not exist no matter how many samples you take. The resolution of every object is set by the optical resolution: a function of the wavelength and the NA of the lens [0].

Aside: super-resolution refers to nanoscopes that break the Abbe' diffraction limit of light [1]. The various set-ups do this in a few very clever ways so the specifics change exactly how well they resolve objects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_resolution

[1] https://www.microscopyu.com/techniques/super-resolution/the-... (a good intro to these nanoscopes)

I can't see any major phone manufacturer doing that, although it sounds really cool. Too much room for error in both the manufacturing and user stages.

Agreed. Positioning optical devices takes very tight mechanical control and a good optical feedback mechanism. I don't think they will be out on the consumer market any time soon. But then again, I thought the same about these tiny sensors and the digital lenses, so who knows.

The problem I have with all the lens add-on stuff for phones is that you still have the tiny sensor and now you've complicated the camera that you just have with you all the time. When I want something more than a smartphone, I have an APS-C mirrorless camera that fits in my pocket (with a 40mm equiv. lens). And is pretty compact otherwise for mid zoom ranges.

When using an Insta360 One X with a monopod for long video shooting, the threaded base gets extremely hot. The rest of the camera does not seem to get hot and I suspected that they were intentionally cooling that way. The accessories tend to be metal as well.

I had the same thought at the first picture. There's already a great big slab of metal visible at the base of the camera with what looks like an easy access path from the processor. If these easy DIY heat sinks catch on, someone's bound to make a longer heat sink, bend the end over in a vise, and tuck it in alongside that existing mass of metal to incorporate it into the heat sink mass. The copper alone doubled the time to overheat, adding that much mass should do substantially more, and almost certainly provide a heat path to tripod mounts.

The R5’s whole body is magnesium already.

It's clearly coated in something and is not just magnesium.

I own an EOS R which is built similarly. It’s painted but it’s all metal, aside from the rubbery bits which I think are mounted on plastic over the metal. You can feel it get cold in the winter: https://www.photographyblog.com/news/take_a_look_inside_the_...

>body is magnesium

It's an alloy with aluminum; along with PC GF-30 parts.[0]:

[0]: https://www.canon-europe.com/cameras/eos-r5/specifications/

That’s right, but the vast majority of it is metal.

Yeah but the thermal expansion/contraction between plastic and composite (PC+GF) would not be welcome. Flip note: glass fiber reinforced polyamide(nylon) and polycarbonate have similar strength to aluminum.

Another issue would be use of adhesive that generally dislike heat even more than the electronics do.

I don’t think the composite parts are structural, but I could be wrong. Either way how come the body doesn’t already dissipate heat? What am I missing? Are the thermal pads not connected to it?

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