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Canon R6 Crashing - Fixed!

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While the Canon R6 is a phenomenal camera, for years, my R6 has been plagued by a repeating crashing issue. After searching online I didnā€™t find anything which described the crash my camera experienced and nobody seemed to know how to fix it. I thought I was alone with a dodgy R6. Then a friend of mine bought an R6. Unfortunately, her version experienced the same crashing as mine. Thankfully her R6 was brand new so she was able to send it back to Canon to repair.

Canonā€™s Fix

After a few weeks of waiting, my friend received an update from Canon, the issue was a problem with the power supply. So they swiftly swapped it with a new one and returned the R6.

After a week or so, the crash came back. As you can imagine this was a hit because it was meant to be repaired. Canon clearly didnā€™t know what the issue was and so took a stab in the dark.

The Issue

Here I want to describe the issue that I had. Unfortunately I donā€™t have any video of the crash because itā€™s so random.

During shooting in mechanical shutter, in H and H+, the camera would appear to continue shooting when you stop shooting. The screen/EVF keeps flickering with a frozen image visible. This doesnā€™t stop, it will keep going. The only way to fix it is to remove the battery from the camera. This isnā€™t ideal as it can be fiddly, will usually result in you missing some shots, and causes the camera to forget its settings which will make them default to the settings you had when you turned it on last.

This issue was unpredictable. It happened every few seconds on one day, then every half an hour on another day.

Attempted Solutions

I tried all sorts to fix this issue, including:

  1. Only using official Canon R6 batteries
  2. Only using third party batteries
  3. Super fast SD cards from most popular brands
  4. High and low capacity cards
  5. Different lenses
  6. Different EF to RF adapters
  7. Shooting in hot and cold weather
  8. Firmware updates

The only thing which fixed the issue was shooting in mechanical shutter, which isnā€™t ideal if you photograph wildlife and want the highest frame rates possible.

The Fix

I had given up with this issue and even considered swapping to an R6II or even an R5. However, in November Canon released an update (1.8.3) for the R6 which fixed a ā€œtouchscreen becomes unresponsiveā€ issue. I wasnā€™t hopeful as this didnā€™t describe the issue I and my friend had been seeing.

Would you believe it, two months down the line and my R6 hasnā€™t crashed once since doing the update.

As I write this, Canon has just pushed another update, 1.8.4 which fixes some start-up delay issues and misc bugs.

So, for anyone out there who has this issue on the R6, do the 1.8.3 update! If you do have this issue, let me know as Iā€™m curious as to how widespread it is.

Thatā€™s all folks!
Niall

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Date Created: 07/04/2024