Red Camera

Peel said:

I'm currently on break during Apple's touring FCS2 Pro App event. Ted from Red was onstage with the Red Camera, and we were able to get a hands on demo after the session.

OMG! This camera is absolutely increadable. It's going to change the industry in BIG ways. 4K video from a $17,000 camera. It's unbelievable. The images are gorgeous. But then the ccd is the size of a 35mm frame, so they should be.

Just need to convince the powers-that-be that they need to authorize a purchase order for one of these babies. Now.

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Not to downplay the cost of Red One, but $17k is for the body only. A complete camera package (depending on your needs) will probably be double that. Still significantly cheaper than it's nearest competitor though.

Stu Maschwitz has a good, realistic, post about Red ownership on his blog.

Lethal

What I'd like to know is why they can't make enough of these. There are thousands that want this camera and they are pumping them out seemingly one at a time. I wish they would figure out a way to mass produce them.

YoYoMa said:

What I'd like to know is why they can't make enough of these. There are thousands that want this camera and they are pumping them out seemingly one at a time. I wish they would figure out a way to mass produce them.

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As someone who makes large-format focal plane arrays for a living, I imagine it's quite difficult to reliably produce the detector chip for this camera. Does 4k refer to 4000x4000 pixel resolution? If that's the case, and the pixel operability requirements are high (likely 99.9%), then it's perfectly plausible that they're having problems getting good chips.

YoYoMa said:

What I'd like to know is why they can't make enough of these. There are thousands that want this camera and they are pumping them out seemingly one at a time. I wish they would figure out a way to mass produce them.

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Because compared to consumer electronic giants like Sony, Panasonic, and JVC Red is a very small time operation w/only a handful of people designing every aspect of a radically different camera and workflow in-house. You might as well ask a local computer store why they can't churn out machines as fast as Dell.

gauchogolfer,
AFAIK Red One has been delayed because getting one of the circuit boards in the camera manufactured to their specifications. The sensor used in Red One is 4520 X 2540.


Lethal

LethalWolfe said:

gauchogolfer,
AFAIK Red One has been delayed because getting one of the circuit boards in the camera manufactured to their specifications. The sensor used in Red One is 4520 X 2540.


Lethal

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Thanks for the info. I'm not anywhere near this league, being content to shoot vacation footage with an Optura 60. I just thought I'd pipe in with the only thing I could think of, which is detector yield. If they've got that part sorted out, I'd imagine they're pretty close to getting real production started. It's only one component, but a pretty major one...

Do you know how they do the color sampling in the CMOS chip? Is it with an RGB filter, or do they do some sort of nearest-neighbor pixellation? Just curious.

gauchogolfer said:

Do you know how they do the color sampling in the CMOS chip? Is it with an RGB filter, or do they do some sort of nearest-neighbor pixellation? Just curious.

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I think it uses a Bayer pattern filter, but off the top of my head I don't remember. But if you pop over to reduser.net and do some searching you'll find out all you want to know and more.


Lethal

gauchogolfer said:

4k refer to 4000x4000 pixel resolution?

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In the film industry, unlike with video "4K" would refer to the pixel count along the longest edge of the frame with is always the horizontal edge. The 35mm frame is 3:2 format so I assume the vertical edge is 2/3 * 4K pixels.

This would make "red chip" 10MP (4000x2667) and we know the size
is 35mm x 24mm. Hasselblad currently mass produces the H3D which has a 48mm square sensor and about three times the pixel count as the RED camera. So Red's sensors is not so impressive. What the H3D lack is a high speed D/A converter and the ability to read out the frames 24 times per seconf and the high speed storage needed for full frame rate video.

RED seems to have intigrated many slightly less then cutting edge technologies and come up with a very cost effective camera

LethalWolfe said:

Because compared to consumer electronic giants like Sony, Panasonic, and JVC Red is a very small time operation w/only a handful of people designing every aspect of a radically different camera and workflow in-house. You might as well ask a local computer store why they can't churn out machines as fast as Dell.



Lethal

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RED is nothing like a local computer shop. They have TONS of money and business sense/experience. Now that they have all of the components, we have yet to hear any news of if/how they are going to produce these cameras in bulk or not. The waiting list is huge and it would just be awful if it stayed that way for the next year. I'd like to see these cameras everywhere, forcing the competition to offer better quality at lower prices. It would also create a market for these on the street which just seems too good to be true at this point.

Btw, it is possible to mass produce a camera if you're not as big as Sony or Dell. RED is a small company, but they have the resources to produce this camera in numbers. Why these points are used to defend REDs position is quite puzzling to me.

YoYoMa said:

RED is nothing like a local computer shop. They have TONS of money and business sense/experience.

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They don't have tons of money compared to their competition nor do they have tons of experience as this is their first camera. I will agree about having tons of businesses sense and they do have some great people working on the hardware and software, but they can't throw the same resources at it like Sony or Panasonic can.

Now that they have all of the components, we have yet to hear any news of if/how they are going to produce these cameras in bulk or not.

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They don't have all the components which is why there is a delay, and, last I heard, after they're able to fill all the pre-orders they'll decide how big the next production run is going to be.

Btw, it is possible to mass produce a camera if you're not as big as Sony or Dell. RED is a small company, but they have the resources to produce this camera in numbers.

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It's in their best interests to get the cameras out to the reservation holders as soon as possible but it looks like that line is going to stretch into 2008 given the current delay. If they could crank out the cameras faster I see no reason why they wouldn't.

Why these points are used to defend REDs position is quite puzzling to me.

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Why you think I'm defending Red when all I'm doing is responding to, what are IMO, inaccurate statements is puzzling to me.


Lethal

But does the Hasselblad H3D shoot
60 frames a second? I don't think so...
it's a still camera...