The Amazing Red Digital Cinema Camera

by Michael D. SellersAs technology marches on, we come to expect great things but it all generally increases incrementally, so it’s really rare when something comes along and seems to take a huge leap past all the competition. That’s what’s happenig now with the revolutionary Red Digital Cinema Camera system which seems almost too good to be true — but is true, and is now becoming available. Without getting too technical — what it is, is a Ultra HD professional camera system that has 5 times as much information per second as a “regular” HD camera, plus it operates without tape directly to a hard disk with all kinds of other things built into it that make it super-exciting for film-makers. Steven Soderbergh is using it; Peter Jackson is using it; the next Angeline Jolie picture is using it. Oh … and the price ..for comparison, the Sony Cinealta top of the line HD Digital Cinema camera sells for $220,000 and the Panisonic Varicam is about $90,000 — and this is really light years ahead of either of them…..and it’s selling for $17,500. That’s right — not a typo. There’s a four month waiting list but it’s really quite a revolutionary system…Anyway, for those interested in this sort of thing, here’s a paragraph to ponder:

Typical high-end HD camcorders have 2.1M pixel sensors and record with 3:1:1 color subsampled video at up to 30fps. We deliver 11.4M pixels at up to 60fps and record RAW, or 2x over-sampled HD in 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 – your choice. That’s more than 5 times the amount of information available every second and a vastly superior recording quality. Don’t need all that data for your workflow? Dial it back, and keep all the other advantages of the Mysterium Super 35mm cine sized (24.4 x 13.7mm) sensor. You get the same breathtaking Depth of Field and selective focus as found in film cameras. Mysterium boasts a greater than 66db Signal to Noise Ratio thanks to its large 29 sq. micron pixels. And 11,480,800 pixels deliver resolution that can only be called Ultra High Definition.

And click on this link to find a good article on the camera that describes it better than I can.And click here to go to the official site for the camera.