Oh, sure. It makes sense from their point of view. Still doesn't make me too happy, though.

The way I see it, the camera manufacturers are saving me money. I was really excited about the JVC HD7 until I read the reviews. The Canon HV20 is hot hot, but I want a hard drive based cam. I am also hoping that one will come out that will last me a couple of years without me feeling like I just purchased an obsolete model.

JAB

Edit: Oh excuse me, you said sub $15000 not $1500!

No doubt... the >$1500 market is looking very good indeed, as is the $15,000 and up market. It's the $3000 to $10000 range that's lacking. That's a big part of my frustration.

I just want an HD camera that's as good an investment as the PD150 was in its day.... for a similar price.

An XDCAM EX in a V1 body would just about fit the bill. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Sony puts the prototype they showed at NAB on a diet.

The XDCAM EX, without taking anything out, in a V1 body, with the new sensors mentioned below, would be nice:

http://dailytech.com/Major+Lowlight+Digital+Photography+Breakthrough+Inbound+from+Korea/article7401.htm

Meanwhile, the various companies are saving me money, too. I just can't bring myself to buy what is on the market. Perhaps the EX. Don't know, yet. Depends on the size, and what gets left out of the final version.

I certainly hope they don't put it on a diet, that'd mean they've shrunken the already small 1/2" imager. I'd like interchangeable glass too but that'd make it a bit bigger and way more expensive.

From my POV, RED changes everything! Sony, Panasonic et al are playing catch-up from day one of RED's release. HDV may prove to be a short lived, interim format, just until the really cool stuff gets here. Woo-hoo!

"I certainly hope they don't put it on a diet, that'd mean they've shrunken the already small 1/2" imager."

O.K., then make it a small shoulder mount like the JVC HD100. I'd be O.K. with that, too. It just looks too big and unwieldy for a Handycam format.

Agreed, a shoulder mount design for the EX would be great!

But no way do I want it smaller if it endangers keeping 1/2" chips, low light is one of the most important features of it for me.

And I don't need an interchangable lens as long as the built-in lens has all the real controls they suggest it does.

Frankly, as it is, most of what I do is on a tripod anyway, so it's not that critical for me, but I'm sure it is for others.

The only other thing I worry about is though they mention a HD-SDI output, I haven't heard analog component HD mentioned... And that is what affordable camera mount LCDs need.

I didn't notice the XDCAM EX prototype I saw at NAB was that big. It appeared to be about the same size as a Z1, perhaps a little smaller.

John

Most of those 'flaws" you listed apply to all HD cameras regardless of price.

Better audio requires more expensive components. Faster lenses cost more to design and produce.

What exactly do you need to shoot that requires such a specialized feature set? Why do you need to own the camera when you could rent one that meets your project's expectations?

The speed at which products are released to the market are planned decades in advance. I have a feeling start-ups who will give us more like Red and new technology and innovation like DOF adapters may spur these guys to bring the 35mm CCD in a few years before they had planned.

BrianStanding:
Perhaps you should go back to film for low light performance---where there is none. I am just happy as a pig in mud with the Z1 low light performance which is about 7000% better than film with ND filters.
JJK

I am an independent documentary producer who self-finances my own projects. Rental usually isn't in the budget. I work a day job, but to help pay for my gear, I occasionally do freelance work, sometimes for television news stations. I can only do this kind of thing because I am fortunate enough to own my own gear.

Look, here's the thing. Maybe I'm being greedy, but I just don't think we should have to take two technological steps backward for every one we take forward.

Six years ago, I bought my PD-150 for $3800. It gave me (and still does):
- 2 channels of uncompressed 48khz 16-bit audio
- Excellent low-light performance
- Solid build quality
- XLR inputs, long battery-life, etc.
- Broadcast-quality Standard Definition images, in a format (DVCAM) readily accepted by most local and network television news stations
- A compact form factor, and (just barely) light enough to handhold for an extended period of time without back strain.

Now, as a tradeoff for an admittedly spectacular jump in resolution, I'm being asked to cope with:
- poorer low light performance (pretty important for documentary work);
- compressed audio;
- no guarantee that networks will continue to buy my freelance work (HDV does not meet most network specs), and;
- a larger, heavier, more awkward camera.

So, I am still waiting for the camera (that I can afford) that will get me into HD, without sacrificing all the other things that are important to me. Clearly the technology exists to build the camera I want, but so far, no one has. Maybe the XDCAM EX will be it, but I find even the Z1 to be a bit larger than I would like, so I'm concerned about the ergonomics.

We shall see.

I use the PD170 and yes the XDCAM EX looks like the next tool.

Tapeless recording is a big key in our next purchase. Tape to computer takes
a big chunk of our time. I still use a light kit even with the 170. It is handy to
run and shoot without setting up lighting.

I think the camera exists that'd meet your needs, you just don't want to pay for it!
You want a car that goes 4x faster than the one you have now. It's going to cost more than 4x the cost of your current car. I could cite many more examples but I'm certain you get the idea, in reality making something with say 4x the resolution, 4x the speed or 4x the anything doesn't even cost 4x, it's not unusual for the costs to increase exponentially. That's not just the cost of purchase either, consider the fuel consumption of a car running at 400KPH!

And yet somehow you want 4x performance at the same price, that's a VERY big ask.

You may be right, Bob. I may be asking too much. But I'm not sure cars is the right analogy.

Look at computers. My Core 2 Duo is a lot more than 4X faster than my first NLE computer, a Celeron 400mhz, yet it cost me LESS than that machine did 10 years ago.

Aside from the optics, what is a camcorder (particularly one that doesn't use tape), really except a very specialized computer? And I am willing to pay more, just not an order of magnitude more. $5K-$7K seems reasonable to me.

Finally, I wouldn't even be making this rant if the perfect, affordable HD camera weren't so tantalizingly close. Take the best features of the HD100, the V1 and the vaporware XDCAM EX and the Red pocket cam and mix them in a blender. I just want someone to do it RIGHT.

Brian:

You'll have to shoot me to pry my FX1 from my fingers. Low-light performance is only about a stop down from my old VX2000, which is an excellent SD platform with performance nearly identical to the PD-170. It's built like a tank with a magnesium case. It uses a very reliable recording mechanism called "tape" which becomes--Shazaam!--its own long-term storage device after the project is over. And the pixel count guarantees that an image recorded by it just blows away any SD image. All for the price of a clunker used car.

My other camera, an HC-3, delivers an image nearly as nice in many shooting conditions but in a container you can literally wrap your hand around. Remarkable.

I'm just waiting for the first HD camera that has a lens with extremely low spherical aberration, making for extremely sharp images.

This is normally insanely expensive, but this design completely disregards the normal design rules that say chromatic aberration must be controlled also. So the recorded image is so bad as to be useless. Ya'll know what CA looks like, and this one beats them all.

Fortunately the DSP chip knows exactly what the CA is at every zoom and focus setting and compensates perfectly by shifting the red, green, and blue images appropriately, scaling each part of the frame as necessary until there is no CA left.

End result = Cooke S4 sharpness from a lens that costs very little to manufacture... :O)

Cameras aren't quite like computers, of course- the performance/price ratio is more strongly influenced by the physical constraints of optics (lens & sensor design). If Red manages to deliver to end customers what their prototypes have already demonstrated, it will certainly be a big step up in that ratio.

Meanwhile it's been a pretty slow development. My FX1 cameras are very usable tools and they outperform the VX2k in general, but the image quality is quite a bit lower than what a 1440x1080i image can be. That is particularly true with the lens wide open- as it all too often is. If I drop a DSLR frame into a HDV project and look at the rendered output, I can see the difference in image quality pretty clearly.

Cameras aren't quite like computers, of course- the performance/price ratio is more strongly influenced by the physical constraints of optics (lens & sensor design).

Well, that was exactly my point.

I was suggesting a particular way to get lenses into the "Moore's Law" World of IT, so that the cost of a good lens can come down. By eliminating the #1 physical lens constraint, that of having to correct for chromatic aberration, which is usually the most expensive physical constraint, great cost savings should be possible.

Since it should now be possible to eliminate many of the lens elements, this will also increase the contrast of the lens [raising the MTF curve]. Visually this means increased clarity and reduced flare.

On top of this, reduced weight and size. And the reduced price of course...

DSLRs have been about 10 years ahead of video cameras in picture quality.

The #1 problem so far seems to have been getting CCDs and DSPs fast enough to do Bayer processing of each frame like in DSLRs.

Instead we have expensive dichroic filters/prisms to separate the image into red, green, and blue for individual monochrome processing on 3CCD cameras.

The end result certainly is not comparable with DSLRs yet, but it will come of course.

I dunno, it sounds too simple. From a theoretical point of view, how is a processing algorithm going to know if a particular photon hitting a particular receptor is from a particular point of light in the distance, or instead an aberration spilled over from a nearby pixel? Perhaps there is a way; I'm years away from any optical expertise I once might have had.

Secondly, I think still cameras and video cameras are entirely different animals. Both have evolved based on the specific needs for that medium. Sure, a still camera has more spatial resolution, but a video camera has infinitely more temporal resolution. The engineers at places like Sony are no slouches and I'm sure the video guys rub shoulders with the still camera guys. It seems to me that any obvious improvements would already have been made.

I, for one, doubt the video guys and still guys rub shoulders. I doubt they're in the same building. It's probably very much like the Vegas team's relationship to Sony Broadcast: Distant! I think what we're discussing here is not engineering, rather marketing. I did read somewhere a blurb from Panasonic saying they were working on a CMOS, Red-like camera. It sounded like more like FUD than anything real. --- Optics is the next frontier. Hasn't changed all that much since Galileo held up those two pieces of glass.