Wow. In that entire article, they never mentioned Elle Schneider even once. That seems pretty shameful.

@digger

To know real story you need to ask this guy who registered domains and was big part or owner of companies used.

@tfinn and don't forget his floating the idea of doing another camera if the price is right

do you think they themselves made any dough out of it? I didn't know anything about his personal history with Polite in Public

@digger hard to see this enterprise being profitable. They did deliver to their purchasers though. Maybe they can parlay the experience into a higher status in the cinema ecosphere.

I spent some more time reading this

As an example, the Digital Bolex has six boards in it, six electronic boards. One for the sound, one for the power, one for the sensor, so on and so forth. Compared to the first Blackmagic camera or the Pocket, they all have one board… Granted there are six boards, twelve layers thick or whatever, but when your power board is in the same board as your sound board and in the same board as your video board, there’s all of this crosstalk and noise, so they have to do noise reduction multiple times for their image. So you have an image that’s been cleaned like fifteen times. So even if they save the same RAW files that we save, Cinema DNG files, it doesn’t mean it’s still RAW. It doesn’t mean it didn’t go through layers and layers of noise reduction and all sorts of other stuff to get there. Whereas we do no noise reduction at all.”

And for me it seems that while he was present at development, he have some problem understanding technical issues and frequently start to sound like early Andrew Raid.
Does he have access to all internal documentation of BM? Where he got "noise reduction multiple times" things?

He [the investor] thought that the way to get the most out of the camera and the company was to go to big box retailers like B&H and Samy’s Camera and a bunch of things like that

Investor seems to be smart man.

If you read carefully you find how some smart guys behind the curtain saved the project, but lost interest in all idiocy.

If the company was restructured with commission-based sales agents instead of expensive media sponsorships, they could easily stay in business. Joe tried to convince the investor to take the money from those final sales to fund the shift. The investor wouldn’t have to pay for it himself. Instead, the investor pocketed the leftover profits and the D16 has remained out of production ever since.

Yeah the investor does seem to be smart.

Joe now knows exactly what the Digital Bolex is. It’s not a black box for fun events, a bare-bones camera for hardcore film nuts, a whimsical hipster toy, or a force of camera ingenuity that will bring Blackmagic to its knees. The Digital Bolex D16 is an educational tool that, true to its analog roots, holds mysteries and secrets that certain filmmakers will absolutely fall in love with.

After all this time they don't even have a coherent vision for what the camera is. Honestly I've always wanted to try the Digital Bolex, but at $3000 minimum your money is much better spent elsewhere than on an "educational tool"

The comments about noise reduction are also weird because it ends up making it sound like the images coming from everybody else must be muddy and gross because there's been so much noise reduction performed on them and that's demonstrably false.

This guy is onto something, regarding software processing applied to imagery acquired, but the way he presents it suggests lack of understanding and knowledge about that very complicated field, and looks really bad, like some hurt princess that blames the rain for being wet.

Very much a real-deal type of thing, authentic to the core, but lacking in the marketing department.

Well, nope. They had one of the best and cheapest marketing campaigns.

2300 is mono 2300C is color

Interesting idea not making any more of these actually. If they have a secret stockpile of at least 100 units, after they have been gone a while and develop something of a small cult popularity maybe he can hock them for twice the original price (or at the bare minimum original list price which is better than continuing to produce and sell one unit a month.

Btw... anyone know of a super 35 or full frame CCD sensor with similar readout capability as this one ?

@digger keep a lookout for an allied vision prosilica gx2300c (no c means monochrome) if you want to try out the same sensor that's in the digital bolex. The ~1920 CCD machine vision cameras are getting really cheap on ebay

I can't see any GX2300C (or even GX2300) cameras on eBay? (not even when checking out past sold listings)

How do you even shoot with these cameras? They are just industrial cameras.