JohnCalvinYoung.com

Says it all, doesn’t it–except the $3,000 price tag. Yes, that’s right–3K for $3K. RED, the maker of the ground­break­ing RED ONE dig­i­tal cin­ema (read film cam­era w/o the film–this is WAY bet­ter than the cam­era the Star Wars pre­quels were shot on) has announced a pair of new cam­eras at this year’s NAB trade show. RED EPIC is a sim­i­larly awe­some cam­era, sup­pos­edly not to replace RED ONE, which will push the absolute bleeding-edge lim­its of dig­i­tal cinematography.

SCARLET, on the other hand, is a lower-end (but still very, very awe­some) cam­era meant to com­pete in the mar­ket cur­rently served by the Canon XH and XL-H lines, Sony’s EX-1 and –3, and oth­ers. As announced, it is sup­posed to be able to shoot 3k frames on a 2/3″ sen­sor (Canon XL-H1s is 1/3″), has an inte­grated lens, shoot to solid-state media, plus good­ies like Wi-Fi con­trol and HDMI-out (HDMI-to-DVI-to-1080p LCD can be done eas­ily for $500, while a good HD-SDI mon­i­tor starts in the multi-thousands.) All for under $3000, if we are to believe RED. Of course, “SPECIFICATIONS, DELIVERY DATES AND DESIGN ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE… COUNT ON IT”–from the RED site, but if we look at RED ONE, they over-delivered, for the most part, albeit a bit late.

This will prob­a­bly shake up the mar­ket, as cam­eras like the Canon XH-A1 will have lit­tle to rec­om­mend them over SCARLET, com­ing as they do with lower res­o­lu­tion and fewer con­nec­tions, except a more famil­iar form fac­tor, cheaper media and an estab­lished name. (Oh, and the XH-A1 is $3999, not $3,000.) Sony’s EX-1 doesn’t even have all that. If RED ONE didn’t estab­lish RED as a player, I don’t know what will…except maybe SCARLET. It’s not quite the rev­o­lu­tion in qual­ity that RED ONE was, with its inte­grated lens and 2/3″ sen­sor, but it would be quite enough for a lot of us. I can actu­ally see myself pos­si­bly get­ting my hands on one in the near future, while with a RED I fig­ured it would be rental for a long, long time. Cameras like this may change the eco­nom­ics of many film projects. Time to get back to work and start saving–spring 2009 isn’t that far away!

(The full infor­ma­tion is here. For those that want to absorb every bit of the spec­u­la­tion, pos­si­bil­i­ties, pre­dic­tions, and rumors out there–I did–there is a fas­ci­nat­ing SCARLET pre­re­lease forum on Reduser.net.)

John Calvin Young