If you’ve upgraded your camera firmware and you’re not happy with it, you may want a real-life “Undo” button to bring everything back the way it was. There are two possible ways to downgrade your camera firmware to the previous version, and in this video, Kolbassia of KH CAMS will show you how to do it on your Canon.
The methods
The first option requires you to go to your camera menu, choose Firmware and click “OK” to upgrade it. But as you do it, open the SD card door and insert the second memory card that has the older version of the firmware. You’ll see two firmware options on the screen: the latest and the previous one. Choose the previous one, click OK, and it will be installed on your camera.
If your camera only has one memory card slot, then the second option is for you. But you need to be really fast and perform both actions simultaneously. Once again, choose Firmware in your camera menu and you’ll have the option of upgrading to the latest one. As you click OK, you need to open battery door. The camera will turn off, and you can now switch the memory cards – take out the one from the camera and insert the one with the previous firmware version. Close the SD card door and then the battery door, and you’ll get to select the old firmware to downgrade to.
Potential problems
Of course, since this is not something you’ll find in the manual, you could face some problems with both approaches. When you use the first method with two memory cards, you may need to wait for a long time before the downgrade is over. And I mean, really long time. For Kolbassia, the process froze at 73% and stayed like that for over 12 hours. In the end, he just turned off the camera by removing the battery. And when he turned it on again – the process was finished and the firmware was downgraded. With option number two, though, there were no problems. The only challenge you may face is that you need to be perfectly precise and fast when opening the battery door and clicking OK for the firmware update. Kolbassia tried both approaches for the Canon EOS R 6, but I assume that it would work with some other models as well. Judging from the comments, most people managed to do it and there was no damage done to their cameras. Still, if you decide to give it a shot, remember that you’re doing it at your own risk. [How to downgrade Canon firmware | 2022 via Canon Rumors]
