RED Komodo to start limited shipping soon for $6k

combatentropy said:
I have an idea for how DVXUser can make money.

Are you tired of everyone agreeing with you?
Do you need someone to argue with you about nothing?
For fun, practice, or just to get the blood flowing,
Come to dvxuser.com for all all your conflict needs!

DVXUser is a text-based Fight Club.

Membership: $19.95/year.

DISCLAIMER: Users assume their own risk. DVXUser is not responsible for hurt feelings. DVXUser is not appropriate for the irony- and sarcasm-impaired.
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This could have been cool for many other threads. I don't think anyone's really arguing in this one.

ahalpert and I are New Yorkers who banter randomly till 4am sometimes.

[I actually always thought I stayed up pretty late until he started posting more frequently, ha.]
 
combatentropy said:
I have an idea for how DVXUser can make money.

Are you tired of everyone agreeing with you?
Do you need someone to argue with you about nothing?
For fun, practice, or just to get the blood flowing,
Come to dvxuser.com for all all your conflict needs!

DVXUser is a text-based Fight Club.

Membership: $19.95/year.

DISCLAIMER: Users assume their own risk. DVXUser is not responsible for hurt feelings. DVXUser is not appropriate for the irony- and sarcasm-impaired.
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Hey - anything to make money in a down economy.

This joke reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about the argument clinic:
 
I think these color schemes will appeal greatly to 22 year olds who just graduated from film school and are buying a Red with Mom's money.
 
Obviously fake and not to scale because I wanted to cover all of the other lens (even though this camera will definitely make many lenses look humongous)...but that's the RF glass I'd use.

Black on blue is nice.

KOMODO_35mm RF.jpg
 
NorBro said:
This could have been cool for many other threads. I don't think anyone's really arguing in this one.

ahalpert and I are New Yorkers who banter randomly till 4am sometimes.

[I actually always thought I stayed up pretty late until he started posting more frequently, ha.]
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NorBro and I could argue for hours about something we agree on.

But I didn't realize it was because you're a New Yorker. Given the posting times, I assumed you were from another time zone, or from another dimension. Oh I see it in your info now.

I used to be a night owl. But now time has no meaning to me. My 4-year old is often up in the middle of the night. And we just had another baby last week. I've been getting 2-3 hours of sleep a day recently and obsessively posting on dvxuser is one of the only things keeping my caffeine-addled brain tethered to reality.

James said somewhere recently that we're just passing time here talking about cameras - nothing wrong with that!

(As an aside, I started using dvxuser more to help kick my budding twitter habit. Apparently people are contractually required to be A-holes on twitter. Dvxuser arguments are love-ins by comparison! This forum is so much better for my blood pressure.)
 
ahalpert said:
James said somewhere recently that we're just passing time here talking about cameras - nothing wrong with that!
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If you are referring to my comment earlier today(yesterday), I said "Camera companies". We talk a lot about how these companies are doing business and speculate why they do things.

Talking about cameras is great. Justifying every odd thing a camera company does to make a profit is not.

If my goal is to shoot images and I want a camera that helps that goal, why would I go about spending hours figuring out how to justify why all these companies are crippling or reinventing the wheel just for profit? It doesn't help me become a better photographer. It doesn't even make me a better person. Just makes excuses for a big company.

However, not everyone here is primarily a shooter. Some are even representing products. I just think it is sad when someone starts talking about camera design and the whole thing gets turned into "They won't do that, they have to make a profit, you're being a spoiled complainer". How can we even really discuss camera design and help each other and the craft if every conversation surrounding camera design turns into a bickering petty argument and all kinds of theories for why big companies should even intentionally make things flawed for profit.

I hope that they don't intentionally make flawed cameras, as I think it is hard enough to make a good camera that no one has to intentionally make them crippled, but I don't know or care. I shoot and work with what is available. When miniDV was available, that is what I happily used. When DSLR gave us selective DoF and improved dynamic range and color science, that is what I used.

But after a decade of seeing the same issues, and seeing people on boards take sides with the companies, it just... idk. These companies pay good money to market their products, not sure why we should spend hours of our lives doing it for free.

Anyway, I figured I was tired of caring about if these companies improved or not, and started looking at Arri or Red. I would have gone Varicam, but wanted to get to test it first, and that all fell through. I love Arri, but I wanted a little more resolution and a larger sensor, so I went Red. There are times I miss the effortlessness of Arri image quality, but I really didn't want to be hauling an Alexa around.

So, now I guess I don't need to worry about cameras anymore. I have one that does everything and looks good even in challenging situations. I don't think I will ever buy Canikony ever again. Just too many bad conversations here on DVX defending big business practices. And I actually really liked the 1DC. Only thing that I disliked was not having a better bit depth and/or a 2K mode. But overall, Canon was really good at customer service, or I got lucky. But at the end of the day, they didn't make a product for me, so I just stopped buying from them and I stopped buying new cameras all together. There were so many laying around that I could rent for peanuts anyways.

Actually, seeing all the Varicam 35's for like $7K now, I kind of wished I had waited to pick up one of those, but last year they were still fetching $13-20K. Alexa Studios are also dropping in price, and those are something of beauty. Idk, the Gemini is lightweight and let's me save about $7K on a lighter tripod (and my back), and about $1.5K less in batteries, haha. But buying a Red is NOT a good investment. It's a tool or a toy. The investment part is dependent on each person's individual situation. Komodo, of course, is different. but Red's are some of the better digital image capture tools available. And believe me, I wish digital image capture was further along than it is. We still have a ways to go.

So, yeah, I love talking about cameras. I really appreciate being a part of the DVX community for that reason. Not even other DP's can talk about cameras for all that long, so there really is not many other outlets than DVX. Have to give a huge thanks to the mods for keeping this place so focused.

This forum is more than passing the time, it is a place to learn and share and hopefully joke and poke fun and learn and poke fun and learn. Not everyone likes the poking fun part. But that just is the nature of community, especially on line. If you don't even have your real name, then it is even sillier to take things too seriously.

Anyways, Abe, I hope you don't think I was anti passing time. During this lock down, passing time is part of life. And I am really glad the DVX community is still kicking ass and thriving. Just wanted to go more into depth on that.

Congrats on the new addition to your family!
 
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Interesting analysis. No, I didn't think you were anti-passing time, but I understand your take better now. One thing I generally appreciate about dvxuser is that the posters don't seem biased towards a specific brand. But I totally agree that trying to figure out why Canikony does things (or worse, trying to justify it) is not as exciting.
 
Those Komodo designs illustrate a point I've been making for some time. Much of the success of the marketing of RED is the positioning of it as a lifestyle brand. Like iPhone, Peloton, Rolex and a host of other brands, the product is meant to represent a certain aspect of one's personality and world view. It is a symbol of status along with being a piece of technology. This isn't a negative statement on the quality or innovation represented by the technology, only that it is a layer applied to it that represents something to a certain client base. In many markets a successful lifestyle branding can represent far more sales than the technical quality of the product. A Rolex is an excellent timepiece and a brilliantly engineered piece of technology, but I highly doubt that most people buy such an item for those reasons.

This is a lesson that that the other manufacturers in this market have not particularly understood. Hand it to Jim Jannard as a guy who came out of an industry (sunglasses / sporting goods) that was driven heavily by lifestyle marketing. He not only saw the opportunity in making a large sensor cinema camera, but also in bringing lifestyle marketing to a product segment that had not previously utilized it. I would say that only a handful of companies have tried to follow suit, BlackMagic Design and Atomos among them.
 
Mitch Gross said:
Those Komodo designs illustrate a point I've been making for some time. Much of the success of the marketing of RED is the positioning of it as a lifestyle brand. Like iPhone, Peloton, Rolex and a host of other brands, the product is meant to represent a certain aspect of one's personality and world view. It is a symbol of status along with being a piece of technology. This isn't a negative statement on the quality or innovation represented by the technology, only that it is a layer applied to it that represents something to a certain client base. In many markets a successful lifestyle branding can represent far more sales than the technical quality of the product. A Rolex is an excellent timepiece and a brilliantly engineered piece of technology, but I highly doubt that most people buy such an item for those reasons.

This is a lesson that that the other manufacturers in this market have not particularly understood. Hand it to Jim Jannard as a guy who came out of an industry (sunglasses / sporting goods) that was driven heavily by lifestyle marketing. He not only saw the opportunity in making a large sensor cinema camera, but also in bringing lifestyle marketing to a product segment that had not previously utilized it. I would say that only a handful of companies have tried to follow suit, BlackMagic Design and Atomos among them.
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You'd think with canon's printing tech they could offer custom skins. I like the bayhem camera, the latest round of trial designs on reduser are pretty lame IMO.

I wouldn't mind tiny stick figures, incorporating something on the camera like the exhaust vents as part of their world. I'm sure it's been done before but I heard of a grip truck in Hungary that had their chapman leonard dolly schematic painted on the outside.

Speaking of the camera support world, that begins to very much fall into the lifestyle branding similar to RED. There are often similar personalities using shotover rigs, car commercial rigs etc, where it's critical to make sure everyone they know sees the toys that got used.
 
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Mitch Gross said:
Much of the success of the marketing of RED is the positioning of it as a lifestyle brand.
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Great point, though I bet that there are just as many if not more cameramen who chafe at the idea of a flashy camera because they consider themselves to be Serious, No-Nonsense Professionals. (Although in the owner/op world, the balance may ne tilted in RED's favor towards self-styled upstart revolutionaries.)

The thing about lifestyle brands for sunglasses and phones is that your target audience (social and work contacts) sees you use them. Sure, your client/director knows you shoot on RED and sees you use it. But the audience has no idea when they watch the actual images.

Just give me a camera that works, is easy to use, makes beautiful pictures, and doesn't break the bank! (Which could be Komodo, lifestyle branding aside.)
 
combatentropy said:
Or take slide film. It had a dynamic range of 7-8 stops, yet still looked nice. Search Google Images for "velvia", for example.
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Velvia's dynamic range was closer to 3-5 stops, depending on the quality of the scanner. With even a reasonably good flatbed scanner it was limited to around 3 stops, but with a high end Linotype-Hell drum scanner it can reach a whopping five or so. I had a few 4x5 slides scanned at a piddling 2000 DPI on such a drum scanner, giving me a chance to compare to the same slides scanned with a flatbed.

Your screen has a dynamic range of 6-8 stops. Movie theater screens are 9-10 stops --- and that was the ideal goal, according to some Academy test instructions.
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Unless it's an HDR screen with a lot more dynamic range than that... mostly right now that means either a good OLED or a staggeringly expensive professional reference monitor.

I used to wonder how a single sensor could have multiple ISOs. If you crank up the amplifier, you crank up noise right along with signal. So you're not changing the dynamic range, just the midpoint.

A camera with a dynamic range of 13 stops, shooting scenes of 8 stops, would have 5 more stops to play with --- the difference between ISO 800 and 25600.
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Remember however that most cinema cameras are ISO invariant.
 
rob norton said:
Who's the real audience?
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I suppose we can debate the answer - is it the people who hire you? Or the people who collectively hire them (the audience at home)?

It's true that I've seen producers and directors get excited about shooting on RED. But at the end of the day, they will have to reckon with the Oscar going to a movie shot on Alexa. (Not that the camera choice matters much for that, but my point is that there are performance metrics that will render judgement on your product and are immune to lifestyle branding).

In any case, the dominance of ARRI at the high-end of narrative production suggests that RED's branding is not affecting that sector.
 
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