Wait, this is The Great John Brawley? Because I am in UK and have not been able to see the whole thing, but it looks great! Also, yeah, weird it is not bigger news. I have not seen it in any of the usual places.

It makes business sense to develop into cameras for sure. Remember BMD already had the hyperdeck before they “added” a camera and monitor.

I just am surprised they only went half way. Why just design a sensor and then announce that they’ve made it? Because you know they aren’t making it. They just designed it. But with no examples or talk of that they innovated. It’s the most expensive and difficult part of making a camera. Typically it takes three years from start to finish. And if they were successful in designing one, the had to have been testing it with images shot in the real world. Why not show and talk about it?

Extensive knowledge of recorders and codecs is also not the difficult work in designing a camera…it’s colour science….The look coming out of it…tuning its spectral response.

They haven’t listed any specifics. There are so many good sensors for manufacturers. That’s what’s a head scratcher for me. Why would you choose this over going direct to a sensor fab that already makes pretty good stock sensor designs? What is the business model here for them?

And I agree. I’ve always thought Atomos is a dead end business. I personally will never trust an external recorder. Monitors obviously is a different use. HDR precision portable monitors is the wild wild west right now.

I imagine that RED will try to re-up their patent to build and extend it to keep it their IP exclusively. Yes patents do expire but this is a common technique for drug companies. They can reformulate a drug and simply change the delivery method for example and voila. A new patent.

Given REDs history in this area, I expect they will try similar legal wrangling to build their IP portfolio. It’s worked very well for them so far. I’m surprised no one has really noticed that REDs beloved REDCODE has abandoned wavelet based encoding for the previously derided DCT that most others use. I’m not arguing one is better than the other, but in their messaging to users REDCODE = Wavelet and REDCODE has been the core IP that’s been most contentious (not the camera part). Now it’s really just the same fundamentally as every other raw codec out there…

JB

Thanks I hadn’t seen that.

8k@60 global is cool for sure. Their HDR modes sounds…interesting. 50% vertical resolution loss for HDR? Not sure how that would “look”. And that’s the thing..No images and it’s all speculation.

I’m not sure Global is the be all these days. Venice and Arri are both high end camera that are RS. It’s obviously not a show stopper. More of a nice to have.

JB

It makes business sense to develop into cameras for sure. Remember BMD already had the hyperdeck before they “added” a camera and monitor.

I just am surprised they only went half way. Why just design a sensor and then announce that they’ve made it? Because you know they aren’t making it. They just designed it. But with no examples or talk of that they innovated. It’s the most expensive and difficult part of making a camera. Typically it takes three years from start to finish. And if they were successful in designing one, the had to have been testing it with images shot in the real world. Why not show and talk about it?

My wild guess is that Atomos saw the writing on the wall about the future of external recorders (although I agree, RED will get up to legal shenanigans to try and extend their life of their patents. But even that won't save the demise of external recorders, as they're already on their way out before the current patent has even expired) and logically decided to max a stab and designing their own camera.

But after going through the sensor development, they perhaps decided it is not for them, and rather than falling into the trap of "the sunk costs fallacy" they just pulled the plug on the project rather than pushing through to finish the camera development.

So now they're just attempted to regain what little (if anything!) they can from the R&D they've done already, by making this available for others.

"But perhaps most impressive, Sapphire has a very low power draw: two watts in 8K. That low power draw means it doesn’t produce much heat either, which Elbourne says allows it to be packaged into smaller camera bodies and it is entirely possible that it wouldn’t even require active cooling.

Very very impressive!