RED's New Digital Stills and Motion Camera Pushing the Limits

rallymatte writes to mention that camera maker RED has announced a new digital stills and motion camera system that includes one model that can shoot up to 28K at 25 fps. The new system will come in three tiers: Scarlet, Epic, and their top of line model which won't be out until possibly 2010. Still image capture will range anywhere from 4.9 megapixels to an insane 261 megapixels. In addition to some impressive 'traditional' hardware, RED also announced a 3D camera.

Comments

Actual Red URL

[xmas2003]

Here's the actual info & specs from Red themselves - be sure to scroll down to the bottom where they have the "Oh ... by the way - 3D" teaser. Crazy stuff (makes my Canon 40D look pokey) - we'll see if they deliver.

Re:Actual Red URL

[sith]

Wow. That's ... wrong.

The RED has a CMOS sensor, as do a number of other fancy-pants video cameras these days.

Re:Actual Red URL

[nattt]

RED sensors are very, very fast, being designed for moving images. That means any skew is reduced to very low levels, and hence no jellocam. Stills cameras use physical shutters, and hence didn't worry about the rolling shutter speed - it just wasn't an issue for them until now.

Of course, film using a spinning shutter that also suffers from skew, but like the RED, it's hardly visible most of the time.

Re:28K what?

[nattt]

28,000 x 9,334 or 261mp.
28k is the horizontal resolution, which is typically how frame sizes are measured in digital cinema.

Re:Could someone tell me...

[Hankenstein]

    Well with a standard 3:2 format the dimensions would roughly be 18360x12240 which at 300 dpi printing (somewhat standard high quality printing) would equal ~ 60x40 right out of the camera.

Mind boggling indeed.

Re:The Upper Limits.

[m3rck]

Actually cinema film cameras go for $65,000 and up. Add film and film editing to get that analog film into digital ($100K), Red looks pretty cheap.

Re:Vapor codewords...

[MoonBuggy]

Actually they've been shipping cameras for a while, these are just the next in the range. The Red One was considered vapour for a while by some people - they started taking pre-orders in April 2006 and actually shipped the first 25 units in August 2007. There is apparently still some wait time between ordering and receiving the camera, but they definitely exist.

They announced the Scarlet and the Epic in April this year, and announced today they they've somewhat revised the design of them.

Re:Beyond limits

[pipatron]

If you shoot at the resolution you are tend to project at, you can't modify the frames in any non-trivial way other than colour/contrast adjustments. Anything else will in practice degrade the resolution. Shooting at a higher resolution gives you a lot of headroom that can be used to for example cut away areas that you don't want to use, and zoom in interesting areas. Similar to when music studios record and work with 192kHz audio signals to give some headroom for processing, then resample to whatever resolution the end user wants, 44.1 and 48kHz for example.

Other uses could be for reporters, journalists or nature photographers who can film at general areas of interest and then later cut out and scale up interesting areas.

CID detectors

[AliasMarlowe]

Turns out you can't read the charge without erasing it.

That's true for CCD and CMOS type detectors, but not true for CID detectors. CID detectors were designed for repeated reading without destroying the charge. In fact, the signal in any pixel can be read out repeatedly while accumulating photoelectrons without interrupting the exposure.

Alas, although silicon-based and employing the same photovoltaic principles as CCD or CMOS, CID requires more complicated chip construction and remains expensive. Indeed, it has been "tomorrow's technology" for a couple of decades already. However, they are used in some scientific and forensic imaging devices, where extremely high dynamic range must be recorded.