Sony has too many models… Red, taking a queue from Apple, who Jannard unabashedly admired, keeps it simple. There is one price range, and there is another. The Scarlet and the Epic clearly both evolved out of the Red One. The top pros have needs that are often completely opposite the budget filmmaker’s needs, and Red, initially having the plan to make pro level gear cheaper…realized they would have to abandon the very people who created the buzz about them in the first place…the indie no-budget crowd…so they made a cheaper camera and a top level camera.

Sony has taken that and in typical big corporate style, narrowcast their products for every single individual step in order to not leave any market segment out (this is the same reason that 30 years ago, each brand of diaper just had one diaper and now they have like 20 kinds, for boys, for girls, for 3-month-olds, for 4-months-olds…)

By doing that, I think they sort of devalue themselves.

Arri, and (someday) Aaton are going off of the model they’ve known and used for many years…by doing that, they will keep their values up, despite digital changing faster with Moore’s law. That helps owners/operators or rental houses b/c they aren’t obsolete/sold cheap 8 months later.

I kind of think we’ll hit a threshold soon at 4k with 120fps…when all cameras can do that cheaply, cameras probably won’t plummet in value as fast as they have the last couple years.

This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. I also think that Canon have become too complacent and the C100, while a nice camera just does not offer what the indi. market wants at that price range. This is an opportunity for Sony to grab back market share!

Arri has basically 1 unit and maybe a few mods. Sony has hundreds. So where has Sony gone wrong? If they have gone wrong. They make marvelous products in the broadcast industry. Yet many are prepared to dish out mega bucks for ARRI – and it is not even 4K! What is ARRI doing right? And commands that high price without reservation? Can Sony equal the ARRI Alexa? This should be a great prize fight. What am I missing here?

Cheers,
Take 5

In the fall Sony put quite a few lower end cameras out which basically had the same specs but under different models. Rather than up the ante a bit – 422, 10 bit, they elected to only give 420, 8 bit. Too funny. Cheers.

” I talked to alot of vendors and they joked about all the different models Sony has put out and the lack of staying power for different models.”

I know alot of rental company owners that almost cut there wrists when there 6 month old $100,000 dollar cameras become super seeded….

The PDX10. The Z1P. The EX1. The EX3. For every new camera, a new eco-system. Never again.

The Red workflow is so complex and you need a 12-Core MacPro to playback 1080p, and if you want to add effects and 2 nodes of color correction, you need to borrow a render farm :-)

I can edit and playback 4K with LUTs and curve effects applied in realtime on a 1600 dollar gaming notebook, off a simple USB3 Barracuda HDD, on set.
But we’ll keep having people around forums and sites preaching the red horror story. :)