Canon Patent Application: Some possible technical details of 1 series camera cooling

This is an intriguing patent.  One of our readers brought this to our attention (thank you - send me your email btw).  This patent clearly shows a 1 series camera body.  The button arrangement in the back does not match up to the 1DX Mark III camera body.

This could be some of the early mechanical design of the 1DX Mark III or it could have nothing to do with it.

This patent application is to find a way to cool down a 1 series camera body, without increasing the size of the camera.  As Canon explains;

Conventionally, even in a digital camera, heat generation in an image sensor and an image processing circuit has become a problem due to an increase in pixels of the image sensor and a high frame rate of a moving image. In addition, the camera itself is required to be miniaturized, and there are few parts that release heat. For this reason, there is a limit to heat countermeasures by using heat transfer members that have been conventionally used to diffuse heat to the respective members and making them uniform.
For this reason, forced air cooling using a fan or the like has been proposed, but if it is built in, the image pickup apparatus itself may become large. Further, Patent Document 1 discloses an external device that effectively dissipates heat of the imaging device when mounted on the imaging device.

The cool thing (literally) about this camera, is that there's a replaceable viewfinder cap that contains a fan unit, so that when you are using liveview shooting video, you can cool the camera via a fan that sits against the optical viewfinder assembly.  See figure 6 for the cap assembly.

The fan assembly, Canon describes as;

FIG. 6 is a diagram illustrating the cooling device 160. The same components as those in FIG. When the cooling device 160 is attached to the camera body 1, the pin 160 b is rotated by passing through the hole 170 a of the eyepiece base unit 170 and coming into contact with the upper opening / closing lid 171 to drive from the closed position to the open position. . The fan 162 is a sirocco-type centrifugal fan, which sucks air from the opening 160a of the cooling device 160 and exhausts air from the fan opening 162a on the lower surface, thereby cooling the inside of the camera. By disposing a sirocco-type centrifugal fan in the cooling device 160, it is possible to realize a compact camera while sucking air from the back of the camera and effectively cooling a heat source located below the viewfinder.

Could Canon be looking at novel ways of cooling this camera, which is the first DSLR to shoot RAW video? It's difficult to say if later on, Canon created more efficient processors and methods that didn't require this technique, or if this is something that the 1DX Mark III needs to cool down its video processing.

Japan Patent Application 2019-191433