Atomos introduced the Samurai Blade at NAB last year, and it was a massive step up from the regular Samurai, increasing both screen size and resolution. For those who didn't need HD-SDI, there was still the cheaper Ninja 2, but at much lower specs. Now the company has announced the Ninja Blade, which takes the Samurai Blade and turns it into an HDMI recorder. Check out some videos below to see the external recorder/monitor in action.
First, the specs (which are nearly identical to the Samurai Blade):
- 325DPI, 5" IPS 1280 x 720 capacitive touchscreen monitor/recorder
- Record direct from the sensor to 10-bit, 4:2:2 ProRes or DNxHD
- Up to 1080/30p/60i
- Waveform RGB & Luma Parade, Vectorscope with zoom, and test pattern generator
- Adjustable gamma, contrast and brightness
- HDMI input and output
- Real-time monitoring, playback, playout to a PC or Mac with QuickTime, and edit logging
- Focus Peaking, 0-100% Zebra, and two modes of False Color monitoring
- S-Log / C-Log recording
- Trigger REC/STOP from camera (Canon, Sony, ARRI, Panasonic, RED, JVC)
- Timecode from camera
- 2.5" HDD/SSD media storage
- Sony NP-F570 Battery type
- Availability: Shipping
- Price: $1,000
The Ninja Blade is $300 cheaper than the Ninja Samurai, so there is a significant savings there if you don't need the HD-SDI. If you do need the HD-SDI later, you can attach one of the Atomos Connect devices that can convert HD-SDI to HDMI (and vice versa) and can fit right into the battery slot of the external recorder. Either way, even if you don't want to use it as an external recorder all the time, it's still a pretty capable monitor, and with their color calibration unit called the Atomos Spyder, you can get precise color on set. F0r $150, you can use the Spyder with either Blade recorder:
Atomos is the worlds first to offer a portable calibration unit for the Ninja Blade - a Monitor, Recording Device and Deck. No other competing device offers this level of color precision. Developed in partnership with Datacolor the Atomos Spyder gives the Ninja Blade one button color calibration normally only found on high end monitors. With Spyder, the Ninja Blade gains the ability to accurately calibrate to the SMPTE Rec 709 color space with a D65 white point with 100% gamut.
The Spyder will also work with regular monitors if you get the correct Datacolor software, so it's useful for more than just the Atomos products. You can find both the Ninja Blade and the Spyder over on B&H.
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