Fujifilm GFX Tip : Overheat Warning

Being summer in the South, we’ve had a few reports of GFX camera bodies producing Overheat Warnings and soon after, automatically shutting down that have been some concern to our clients.

While somewhat startling to have this warning appear and subsequently your camera go dead, it should not be of any concern to users that their camera is somehow suffering damage as a result of these actions. (Make sure to shoot factory Fujifilm batteries, the 3rd party versions have been known to prematurely overheat the camera)

I’ve pushed these cameras pretty hard and have indeed received the warning myself, but with the toggle of one setting, you can abate the automatic shutdown while still keeping your camera safe, albeit hot to the touch.

I’ve spoken to the head gurus of the US Technical Support team for Fujifilm and they’ve assured me that the automatic shutdown was to abate the possibility of the camera being uncomfortable to hand, not that it’s there to abate physical damage to the camera.

We have found that in all the cases of overheating reported to us, it has been camera on tripod work, with the camera body fully being exposed to the sun, so while your hot hand may insulate heat in the camera, the effect of our star 93 million miles away is the real determiner of internal heat within the black bodied camera.

To avoid these shut downs, a simple strategy of use can be applied as well as a menu toggle can be employed to keep your camera hot, yet ready for action.

• The strategy of use is to float the LCD screen slightly off of the body in order to allow airflow between the back of the camera and the articulating screen:

Within the SET UP menu, navigate to POWER MANAGEMENT:

and then toggle AUTO POWER OFF TEMP to HIGH

as you do, it will warn you that you’re enabling this feature but now the hot little picture making device can continue doing its job unabated by hot environmental conditions. -bk