Red to Announce 25mp DSLR / Video Body November 13th?
RED corp, founded by the guy who started Oakley sunglasses, had a cool idea a couple of years- make a digital video recorder that can use interchangeable lenses (even Nikon and Canon lenses with adapters) with quality as good as 35mm film and sell it for ($17,000) a whole lot less than normal professional movie cameras ($100’s of thousands).
Surprisingly to me, and probably others, they delivered. It’s surprising because it’s not at all unusual for a company to come out of nowhere and promise of disruptive technologies and never hear from them again (hey, remember Silicon Film? They went from ~1997 announcement to 2008 bankrupcy?)
Well lately, they’ve been talking about coming out with an SLR, or video camera with SLR-like capabilities using their movie camera’s 25mp chip (presumedly).
This might be nothing for Nikon and Canon to worry about but it sure would be interesting to have a movie camera capable of good stills, that didn’t suffer from Jello-Shots, and could use just about whatever Nikon or Canon (and others with proper adapters) lenses you wanted to throw at it.
Unfortunately though, the RED cameras (so far) don’t have any sort of autofocus, so I wonder about these in fast-action situations.
If I was putting money on it, I’d think this’ll be interesting to watch but won’t give the Dynamic Duo (Nikon, Cannon) and sleepless nights, at least for a few different revisions of their new system.
Tags: competition, jello, movies, red
October 27th, 2008 at 22:06
The Red is a great camera, but most don’t realize that it actually has a pretty small sensor. The current “Mysterium Red One” is a 12.065MP sensor with dimensions of 24.4 x 13.7 mm. That’s only 38.7% the size of FX and 89.6% the size of DX.
I don’t know if this new camera is planning a larger sensor or not. And pro film and video cameras have always featured removable lenses. They just weren’t necessarily Canon or Nikon mount lenses.
October 28th, 2008 at 21:12
Red has a rolling shutter, and also exhibits skew when panned rapidly. Like the Canon 5D MK II, when you use it to take photos like a professional (No waving the camera around, but on a tripod or gyro) the skew is a non problem.
However, it gets more difficult with a large sensor compared to a 2/3 inch one.