I’ve had an interesting experience with my R7 over the past couple of days. I’ve been photographing hummingbirds visiting a feeder and Immediately started getting lock-ups. I’ve had lock-up’s with the R7 in the past but at that time I was using a slower “v10” card. I switched it to a v60 card and hadn’t had any lock-ups up until yesterday. I figured it was just the slow/older card but now I’m not sure.
The card I was using yesterday was a Ritzgear V60 64GB card. As soon as I started taking photos of the hummingbirds the viewfinder image would freeze for a couple of seconds then go black. After a few seconds the camera would reboot and be ready to go again.
Each time I would get a few seconds of photography and then another lockup.
My initial setup was the R7 with adapted EF 500mm f/4L IS USM shot wide open. I was using electronic shutter in H (15fps) drive. Animal eye AF active with the full area. I was in case “auto”
After struggling with it for about ten minutes I changed to a v90 Sony Tough card and got the same lock-up’s. Then I tried a Sandisk Extreme Pro v30 card and same lockups.
My next step was to try EFCS w/H+ (15fps); animal eye AF and shot for half an hour and over 1000 images without any lockups. My first thought was maybe it’s some compatibility issue with ES and the old EF lens. However, I did try my R6 in ES (20fps) and the same memory card and no lockup’s at all.

I tried the ES with the single frame mode and animal eye AF on the Hummingbirds and again lock-ups almost immediately.
I then took a couple of opportunities to photograph some ducks flying past with ES and animal eye AF and H drive and everything functioned beautifully (no lock-up)
So I was curious to see if this is a problem specific to my old EF lens or more of a general issue. To check, went out this morning with the RF 100-500L mounted on the R7 and headed to the hummingbird feeder. In ES w/animal eye AF in H drive the R7 locked up within a minute. When switched from ES to EFCS no lock ups. I then tried ES without animal eye detection (just single point AF in Ai-servo, H drive and no lockups.
So it appears that the issue happens only when ES is used in conjunction with animal eye AF on rapidly and erratically moving hummingbirds.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I’ve used ES and animal eye AF on many moving subjects (herons, ducks, parrots, sandpipers…) and never had this problem. With the hummingbirds it’s happening like clockwork and it seems to happen when the hummingbirds are really active, chasing each other around. When the hummingbird is just hovering in one place there aren’t any lockups.
Before anyone gets too stirred up, in my opinion this issue isn’t really a big deal because the rolling shutter in ES with the R7 is so bad that the majority of the hummingbird photos that I took with ES have very obvious distortions making ES not really practical for this sort of photography anyway. I was mainly trying the ES to see the frequency of rolling shutter distortions and it’s very high. Even if there wasn’t any lockup problem I wouldn’t use ES making the lockup issue mostly just a curiosity.
