Alright, I've got a peculiar video for you today,
and a little bit pointless, I'll admit.
I'd set out to make a video about the Sony cameras,
the more recent ones that have that
4K30 capability over USB,
where they just show up.
It's like a UVC whatever protocol,
where you just plug 'em in your computer over USB-C,
and then you can use them as a webcam
or as a streaming device.
I like that protocol a lot,
but only some of the recent cameras have the 4K30.
But I know that people were having issues
with overheating and performance when using that protocol.
So I thought, well, the 4K30 one has to certainly be worse.
Let's actually do a roundup,
and see which camera can maintain that 4K30,
you know, live streaming slash webcam functionality
for the longest, the most reliably.
That was the goal.
And I did do that, and I do have an answer for you,
but in the process of testing it,
I've come to completely hate all forms
of overheating testing,
and find them completely unreliable.
I must have done 30 to 40 rundown tests,
and the results are all over the map,
to an extreme level that you won't even believe it.
Let's just talk about the results.
So first of all, all of these tests were conducted
between 21 and a half Celsius to 23,
which is about 71 to 73 Fahrenheit.
And I have to give a range,
because I don't have like a heat chamber.
I'm doing it in my basement,
and it was winter time when I was running these,
so the furnace would come on,
it would heat it up to a certain temperature.
I would try to run the tests,
but it would slowly decrease,
and then the furnace would come back on.
So that range, that one and a half degrees,
is from like the hottest right after the furnace just ran,
to the lowest before it would come back on.
But I still think it's important
because nobody is going to probably have an environment
that they're using these in,
where they're keeping it to within
a tenth of a degree all the time.
It's gonna fluctuate in every environment.
So if your results fluctuate to such a degree,
when I'm controlling it down to 1.5 degrees, that matters.
So the cameras that I tested were the a6700,
the ZV-E1, the a7C II, and the a7CR, which I have here.
And then the a9 III.
And obviously this video's not sponsored by Sony.
They didn't have any input on this.
They did lend me the a9 III for this test,
but the other cameras I borrowed from Camera Canada.
Once again, huge thank you to them.
They always come in at a pinch,
when I need to borrow some stuff.
This video is sort of brought to you
by this new T-shirt though,
the Banana Anatomy Diagram T-shirt, which is for sale now.
I've been talking about it a little bit ahead of time.
It's even got the little bananus joke from that video,
for anybody who remembers the banana review video.
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I'll put a link in the description.
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This is what they look like.
I kind of blend into the background with it on.
Maybe don't wear it in front of a purple background.
But anyway, if you like the shirt, pick one up.
I think they're great.
To give you some times, on the a6700,
I got 22 minutes and 56 seconds, and then it overheated.
On the a7C II, I got 37 minutes.
I ran it a second time, and I got 30 minutes.
So between 30 and 37.
Both of those are not great candidates
for this 4K30 live streaming.
I had some good results with the a7CR.
And so I was gonna tell you, that's the one.
That's the one.
If you wanna do streaming right over USB
with a Sony camera in 4K30, get the a7CR.
Because the first time I ran a test,
I got 1 hour and 46 minutes with a 4K30.
And I thought, "Great.
That's a good result."
4 hours and 53 minutes was the next test.
So that's when I was like, "Okay, let me get this furnace.
Let me get all the ambient temperature just dialed right in,
so I can see what's causing it."
Because like to go from 1 hour and 20
to 4 hours and 53 is such a drastic change.
And of course, I'm leaving cool down times between this.
Like the, the 4 hours and 53 minutes,
that takes me till nighttime.
I go to bed, I wake up the next day, and I run 'em again.
So the camera's cooled down for hours.
And then I ran the test again, and I got 54 minutes.
So we went from four hours and 53 minutes to 54 minutes,
with the temperature probably less than a degree difference.
So I was like, "It can't be that huge
of a difference with ambient, right?"
So again, checked it, measured the temperature,
made sure everything was all rigged up, ran it again.
Eight and a half hours!
And then I just turned it off and went to bed.
I left it running all day basically, and it just kept going.
And I had OBS, and I was recording everything,
and nothing was changing.
And any of these tests with any of these cameras
was all the same setup.
The same sort of tripod, the same subject.
I put a video of me talking and moving my hands,
and stuff like that on a loop.
So I would have eye-auto focus,
and there'd be a lot of like moving pixels and stuff,
same stabilization settings.
Everything was identical.
Everything.
And I could get a fluctuation between 55 minutes
and eight and a half hours, within like a degree,
degree and a half ambient temperature difference.
And if it really was the ambient temperature,
when that eight and a half hours was running,
it would've gone up and down and up and down.
That ambient would've had that degree and a half change,
and at no point did it make it overheat.
So doing this test completely kind of like shattered
my understanding of what we've come to expect
from overheating results for Sony.
At the same time I was doing this,
Philip Bloom was working on his ZV-E1 review
that he posted a couple weeks ago.
And we were chatting about, you know, what we were up to,
and I was telling him about this,
and he says, "Oh, I'm actually doing the ZV-E1."
And he mentioned that when I did my original review
on the ZV-E1,
that I got 56 minutes in this 4K30 mode.
'Cause that camera was the first camera
that had this 4K30 live streaming.
So I was excited when I tested it.
I was like, "Look, I got 56 minutes
with the 4K30 live streaming."
So I said, "Well, hey, Philip,
since you got the camera anyway,
and you're in a different environment,
and you'll do things slightly different,
can you do a couple live streaming tests for me?"
And so he did.
He had pretty much the exact same experience,
that's the best part.
Is he started doing it, and he's like,
"Yeah, I ran for two hours,
and then I shut it down and went to bed.
No problems, no warning, no anything."
And I was like, "Okay, well, that's better than I got."
And then he ran it again, and he got 24 minutes.
And he was like, "Let me see here.
There must be something.
Maybe the ambient was different."
And his place is even like a degree or two cooler than mine.
But again, within the entire ambient swing for him,
was again, only a couple degrees.
Just shift his entire temperature down, you know,
one or two degrees.
And so then he runs it again,
and he gets three and a half hours or something like that.
And he texted me, "Okay, now I got three and a half hours,
and I even started recording internally halfway through,
and it still didn't overheat.
So, I don't know, I'll run it again,
and that will help me decide if it's ambient or not."
And I think he ran it again the next morning.
34 minutes and overheat.
So he was in the exact same situation as me,
where he said, "All the tests are ruined.
I don't know what to think, because the times are absurd."
Basically, the same thing.
He got went from 30 minutes to almost four hours
with almost nothing changing.
How does that make any sense?
And I had the extreme,
where I could go from 55 minutes one time,
eight and a half hours the next time.
Now, all that being said...
Well I guess, oh, and we also did the a9 III,
which had a very similar experience
to maybe the ZV-E1 and the a7CR,
which is, I got 40 minutes, then 2 hours and 20,
then 41 minutes, then four hours, and I turned it off.
So again, completely inconsistent.
All I can really say is that there's some cameras
that consistently did not perform
for a long period of time,
and that'd be the a6700 and the a7C II.
And I have a theory as to why that is.
I think it's the oversampling.
And Mr. Fuji X100VI sitting right here
is gonna support that claim.
The a7CR doesn't oversample
in that 4K30 live streaming mode.
It does the proprietary, you know, pixel binning thing.
And so I think that's the reason why
it can perform a lot better.
The a9 III maybe can perform not as good as the a7CR,
but better than the smaller bodies,
because it's a bigger body, more robust,
it can handle the oversampling that it does do better.
And then the ZV-E1, it doesn't oversample as much.
It's like what, like, 4.2K or something like that,
down to 3,800.
So it's not required to do as much,
which is good because that body is kind of compact and hot.
So that's how I think we get the tiers.
It's like...
The one that doesn't oversample performs the best,
then the a9 III and the ZV-E1 have trade-offs
so that it performs second best,
and then the a6700 and a7C II
are oversampling with compact bodies,
and they overheat fastest.
But the Fuji X100VI,
which I'm gonna make a bit more in depth
of a video on this than just this,
but I had this sent to me around the time
that I was wrapping this up.
So I ran a test on this as well.
It gives you the option when recording
to choose like an HQ mode or a non-HQ mode.
And the HQ mode oversamples from the 6K,
and the non-HQ mode does not.
When you connect the USB to do...
Oh, by the way, I didn't mention this.
The Fuji also has that, you know,
convenient plug it in, UVC protocol thing,
where it just shows up as a video device
with no software or nothing.
It just works.
Apparently, this generation...
So that would be like the X-T5,
and like whatever cameras are of that generation of Fuji,
including this X100VI, all have that protocol.
I just haven't tested them before.
So this gave me an opportunity to test that protocol.
When you plug it in, it smartly goes to non-HQ.
And when I ran these two side by side,
my sort of winner of Sony and the X100VI,
they both ran for 3 hours and 58 minutes,
and then I turned them off.
Because I was like, "Okay, four hours is enough."
I guess I just want you to know two things.
This is my conclusion.
One, if you need a Sony camera to, for some reason,
also be a live streaming camera over USB,
or you want to take your Sony camera,
and use it for, you know, conference calls,
and you wanna do it in 4K30,
which camera will last the longest?
It's the a7CR.
And apparently the Fuji...
Gen5 Fujis are pretty good at it too,
which I didn't know until just now.
But the second thing I want you
to take away from this video,
is that overheating tests are a lot less reliable
than even the people who, like myself,
who were a little bit raised eyebrow about them.
They're even significantly less reliable than that.
If you remember some of my videos lately, I've been like,
"Hey, it lasted for an hour and a half for me,
but that was in this environment, in this situation,
your results may vary."
My results may vary, apparently, drastically,
from 55 minutes to eight and a half hours.
So just keep that in mind that.
That's all I'm saying.
And until somebody...
Me or somebody else, gets some kind of heat chamber
where they can control it to a tenth of a degree,
and run that test 10 times, you know,
with some systematic method,
take overheating results with a finer grain of salt
than you were already.
Eight a half hours to 55 minutes?
What is that?
Alright... I'm done.