Jarred also announced that RED will offer a trade in program for Scarlet owners who want to upgrade to a Dragon Epic.

Read more…

• Quick release overview: www.vimeo.com/39225172
• Quick release dovetail detail: www.vimeo.com/39225593
• Quick release bolt on plate detail: www.vimeo.com/39225718

It turns out RED’s 6k Dragon sensor coming in the next few months will actually be HIGHER resolution than Sony’s F65 “8k” sensor. How is this possible?? I detailed here how Sony uses a whacky method of counting pixels to claim their F65 has an 8k sensor. If you calculate the F65 sensor’s resolution like you would with any other camera, it comes out to 5782 x 3060. Remember that number.

When RED announced their 6k Dragon sensor they didn’t give the exact resolution but a couple posts in the reduser forums give us enough info to figure it out. The sensor will be 30mm x 15.8mm with a pixel size of 5 microns. Do the math and we can deduce that Dragon will be 6,144 x 3,160 or 19.4MP. That is 1.3 million photosites MORE than the F65′s supposed 8k sensor! RED has always advertised the active sensor area of their cameras and there is no reason to assume it will be any different this time.

It’s no wonder RED has so many fans when for $6k we can upgrade our cameras and have the highest res motion camera in the world again.

Sony’s F65 is the latest camera to join the fray with what Sony claims is an ultra hi-res 8K sensor. 8k sounds mighty impressive, but when you start looking at Sony’s specifications things don’t add up. Right there in the F65 manual, Sony lists the sensor dimensions as 8192 x 2160. Good, there are the 8 thousand horizontal pixels but why are there only 2 thousand vertical pixels?? Does the F65 have an ultra ultra 4:1 widescreen sensor? No, right in the manual it says the aspect ratio is 17:9, right around 2:1 where we would expect it. Sony must have figured out a way to break the space/time continuum!

It turns out the 8k number means absolutely nothing in terms of the sensor’s actual resolution. Here is how they get that number: they take a 6k x 3k sensor and flip it 45 degrees. Then, instead of counting photosites in a horizontal straight line, they stair step up to the line above it. Stair stepping gives them the 8192 horizontal pixels but since they’ve used 2 horizontal rows to achieve this they can’t stair step on the vertical and they only get 2160 pixels. This is an absolutely bonkers way of counting photosites and tells us nothing useful about the actual resolution of the sensor. This means I can tilt my Epic 45 degrees and suddenly it is a 7k camera (hopefully no one will notice the diamond shaped frame)!

So what IS the actual resolution of the F65 sensor? If we multiply 8192 by 2160 that gives us 17,694,720 million active photosites. In the F65 manual Sony says the aspect ratio is 17:9 which means the F65 has a 5782 x 3060 sensor. That is plenty of resolution for a nice 4k debayer but it is definitely not 8k.

Why does this matter? RED’s Dragon sensor coming in late 2012 will be 6,000 x 3,160 (rightly marketed as a 6k camera). That is 1.3 million MORE photosites than the F65′s “8k” sensor, but on paper one would be lead to believe the F65 is the higher resolution camera.

REFERENCE

Sony F65 manual www.talamas.com/Sony%20F65%20Operation%20Manual.pdf

Blackmagic design has announced a RAW, 2.5k cinema camera with a sensor size that falls somewhere between S16mm and Micro 4/3. Blackmagic has really created a lot of buzz for this camera by pricing it at $3,000. It has a unique form factor with the battery and touchscreen LCD built right in.

Here is a quick list of the details:

• Price: US$2995
• Perks: comes with a free copy of DaVinci Resolve
• Resolution: 2432 x 1366
• Sensor size: 15.6mm x 8.8mm
• Recording format: 12-bit DNG RAW or Log ProRes on 2.5″ SSD drives
• Lens mount: EF Canon mount
• FF35mm Crop factor: x2.3
• Form factor: built in touchscreen LCD and battery
• Rolling shutter: a bit better than the 5D MkII
• Low light performance: not as good as 5D MkII

Sensor Size:

Here is how the Blackmagic Cinema Camera’s sensor size stacks up against other cinema cameras. It is the bright blue rectangle labeled BMD:

RED showed off the 4k laser projector they announced at NAB 2011 today.  Ridley Scott and his son Luke shot a short film “Loom” on Epic cameras and the 3ality Technica Atom rig that was shown in RED’s NAB theater in 2k passive 3D (engineers were in a hotel room working on the 4k boards).  The laser projector will be able to do simultaneous 4k for each eye very soon.

We attended the very first screening at 9am on Monday morning and were blown away.  Being a Ridley Scott production shot by Darius Wolwski, 10 seconds in we forgot about 5k, lasers, simultaneous 3D and were just drawn in to the great story and beautiful images.  It really hit us when we walked out of the theater, we can have THAT for $10k.  Amazingly a REDray player is built in.

The RED Laser Projector is natively stereoscopic meaning all you need to view 3D is a polarized silver screen and passive 3D glasses. Due to the lasers providing the projector a very stable light intensity per primary color it can auto calibrate itself. For 2D a standard white screen or just a wall will suffice.

Details:

• Price: $10k (good for up to a 15 foot screen)
• Input: REDray player, also accepts HDMI or HD-SDI input
• Rez: 4K, 12 bit
• 24 foot lamberts
• Simultaneous right eye/left eye
• 3D and 2D up to 120fps
• Laser lasts more than 25,000 hours
• No calibration necessary
• Add laser modules to scale up to a big theater

• S35mm covers full 5k
• pl mount
• lesss than nine inches in length
• less than six pounds
• detachable servos