Beware, Canon R8 overheating can also lead to failure!
Long story short: Everyone knows that the Canon EOS R8 is prone to overheating when doing video recordings. But it can also cause it to fail rather quickly!
DO NOT buy this camera if you plan on doing a lot of long video recordings!!
The longer story: Got this camera last year for personal use. Occasional photography, and then also brought it with me on a 2 week vacation where I used it daily for vacation photos. Something like 4000 photos and no issues at all. I'm not much of a video guy so very limited video recording on my trip.
A month ago I was using it to record some of our indoor sports tournament games. Ambient temperature was around 24C. Total of 4-5 hours continuous recording on the first day. Everything went smoothly. It recorded ok at 4k 30fps. I had it hooked up to USBC so it could record continuous without the battery dying. Surprisingly, never overheated.
Second day, things took a turn. (Same place, same temp, indoors) The first recording stopped around 25 minutes. I wasn't there when it stopped but when I circled back I noticed the camera was hot and no longer recording. Damn, the notorious overheating issue. I started the recording again and each time I came back I could see it would stop around 25-35 minutes. I did this maybe 3-4 times before I gave up. I let it cool down and maybe an hour later I started using it to take photos. It was working ok for a bit, but then it started flashing to a green screen and shutting off. Sometimes I could see the red led like it was writing to the memory card but the camera was unresponsive. If I let it do it's think, it would become responsive again in like 30 seconds or a minute. Or I could take the battery out and the camera would be ok. This kept going on getting worse and worse. First I could take a few photos before it shut off. Then it would do it within seconds of turning it on. I tried different batteries, different SD cards, different lenses. Nothing worked. (Note, the camera did not feel hot at this point in time, unlike before during recording)
The next day...I tried to replicate it at home. It was fine. Recorded video for an hour. Took photos. I thought....uh...ok. maybe just a glitch.
Fast forward a month, I took it out to take photos at a friend's party, after a minute or two, the same thing happened again. And it would shut off faster and faster and literally would shut off after 5 seconds.
Camera was never exposed to the rain, never exposed to hot temperatures, never dropped, always stored in a camera bag.
I highly suspect the circuit board overheated and now there is some sort of broken trace or intermittent connection. So now I've sent it back to Canon to see if they can fix it. Flat rate fee of $600!! Still waiting to see if they upcharge since they said the flat rate is subject to some sort of max.
So.....BUYER beware. If you plan on buying this camera, or any Canon Mirrorless cameras for video recording. Be aware that this camera is NOT designed for video. It is a feature they added on. If you are buying it for photography, you're probably fine. Probably...... It is in many ways an amazing camera. But not for video. It will end up a very expensive repair.
Also, there seems to be a new Canon R8 firmware update today. It mentions "Improved Operational Stability". No idea what that means. Did they know the overheating could cause the cameras to prematurely fail? .