Mike Curtis at HD For Indies brought news yesterday of a mysterious camera named Red. The
site for the camera is very sparse with most of the links linking to a "coming soon" page. But some of the proposed stats are mind-boggling (quoting Mike here because the site is all graphic):
- 4520x2540 pixel resolution. Native.
- captures RAW (sounds just like digital still cameras' the way they put it), 4:4:4 or 4:2:2, however you want it.
- Uses standard 35mm PL mount film lenses, or their mount and lenses.
- Records to their "RED Flash based system, external hard drives, BlueRay (sic), tape or any other capable format."
- Shoots pretty much any frame rate you'd want.
- format - "RAW 4:4:4 through dual fiber channel outputs" (egads, that's gotta be some hellacious throughput!).
So they are promising the world and it will be a surprise to see the camera in production. Mike has a lot of excellent points both in his
initial reaction and also his
analysis a day later. Like Mike, it is clear the biggest problem with this kind of camera is storage. Unless something like holographic media bursts into the scene, it would be hard to imagine anybody being able to afford this.
