Nearly two years ago, I made the following post on RedUser:

Ten years from now it’ll probably be possible to do something significantly better than the RED ONE (higher resolution, higher frame rates, HDR), with a body the size of a present day digital SLR, capturing to commodity storage (hours of footage on the future equivalent of a CF card), for a few thousand bucks. This is an information technology market now, and that’s the kind of progress I think we can expect to see, especially as RED’s competitors react to RED, or more companies enter the market with RED’s outlook, and we get rid of the sort of market segmentation nonsense that has plagued the market thus far.

At the same time… RED looks like it’s going to deliver an image good enough for almost any purpose, up through 4K theatrical projection. And there probably isn’t much point in going over 4K for projection, due to limitations in the resolution of human vision. The 4K RAW + REDCINE file-based workflow also eliminates a lot of artificial barriers in terms of data and tape formats as well. This means, unlike with more limited cameras, you won’t be praying for something better starting from the day you unpack your RED. Though better things will come out, the camera should have a very good useful life span, compared with products which are much more compromised out of the gate, like today’s prosumer cameras.

Also, many of the accessories you buy for your RED (PL mount lenses, matte boxes, etc.) are built to industry standards that have already lasted for decades, and will probably last for decades more. This is, again, a considerable improvement over the prosumer market, where accessories are often specific to one camera or one vendor. It will do a lot to help protect the value of a serious investment in this sort of kit.

Well, yesterday’s Red announcements will get us closer to everything I described in the first paragraph. Anyone who didn’t expect that to happen hasn’t properly internalized that it means for an industry to become an information technology industry.

But everything I said in the second paragraph is also still true. The images from the Red One held up quite well on cinema screens last Wednesday, before the new announcements. And they still do today. And they still will in 12-24 months, when Red’s new stuff is shipping. And they probably still will in 10 years; human vision isn’t getting notably better over time. To all the people freaking out about having an obsolete camera soon… why did you buy the thing? If you bought it because you wanted to make images of sufficiently high quality that they’re acceptable for anything up through theatrical exhibition, relax. You own a camera that does that, and nothing Red introduced yesterday (or will introduce in the future) will change that.

It also pays to consider the details of Red’s new lineup. First off, pricing. Red has announced the prices of its planned line of “brains”, but not of any of the other components that turn them into fully-fledged cameras. You shouldn’t be looking at that $7000 Scarlet brain and telling yourself it does everything your Red One does at less than half the price. I have no idea what the prices on the other system components are, but given that they’re shared with the Epic brains, which are designed for the high-end market, I’m guessing they’re very high quality, and not cheap.

It’s not too hard to imagine you’re looking at another $5000 for the I/O module, a recording mechanism, the control mechanism, and the lens mount. If that’s the case, it’s not a $7000 camera, it’s a $12,000 camera. Which, while it shoots at a slightly higher resolution than the Red One, and comes in a more modular smaller and lighter package, also doesn’t have the frame rate and format flexibility of the Red One. Jim Jannard has been very clear about this, though details haven’t been posted yet. I’m guessing the Scarlet models won’t be able to shoot 2K at 120 frames/sec, won’t have an anamorphic mode, and might not support frame rate ramping. Does the Red One really seem like such a bad deal for $17,500 at that point? Especially considering that Red plans to offer some sort of sensor upgrade for the camera.

How about going in the the other direction? Red is offering that $17,500 credit to Red One owners if they upgrade to Epic. I just did an analysis of what we spent on our Red one. In total, we sent $34,347 to Red. Of that, we’d get a credit for $17,500. Another $6500 of that is the Red 18-50 zoom, which we’d keep and use with Epic (If we decide to upgrade, it’ll almost certainly be to the S35 model). Another $4650 is the viewfinder and EVF, which will also work with the Epic. And then there’s $2350 for batteries and a charger — also compatible with the new equipment via an adaptor cable You’d probably still want some of Red’s new batteries for form-factor reasons, I’m guessing, but I suspect we’d still get use out of our Red Bricks.

Add that all up, and $31K of the original $34K we sent to Red is either eligible credited against our Epic purchase, or went for gear we could continue to use after upgrading. In other words, if we upgrade, buying the Red One will have gotten us a digital cinema camera to use 18-24 months earlier than otherwise, for an additional cost of less than $4000 vs. waiting for the S35 Epic to ship and buying that to begin with. Given what the Red One has done for our business, and the skill set it has allowed us to build up, that seems like a pretty damn good deal.

If there is a group Red’s upgrade plans don’t work for, it’s Red One owners who want to buy into Red’s new modular system, but can’t afford the Epic and are willing to take a bit of a hit in terms of features going with the Scarlet.

Red doesn’t provide any sort of trade-in credit on Scarlet purchases, just a one-time 12% discount to existing Red One owners (you get to keep your Red One, of course). But there’s a simple way around this: sell your Red One. With the $17,500 credit for Epic buyers and the fact that the Red One will still offer some capabilities the Scarlet brains won’t at a much lower price than the $28,000 S35 Epic, there should still be a decent market for Red One bodies for a while. You won’t get $17,500 (now that Red is caught up on orders, anyone who wants to spend full price will just buy a new camera), but you’ll probably get enough to go a long way toward funding your Scarlet purchase.

I assume everyone who reads this blog as seen this by now.

I really love the modular concept here. Red is definitely headed in the right direction in that respect. As for the large number of “brain” options, I was initially concerned, but having thought it through, I think I might have figured it out.

I’ll leave the large-format cameras out of this for the moment, since they’re clearly specialty devices, and aren’t even expected until 2010 (and Red tends to be a bit optimistic about ship dates).

That still leaves six other “brains”. Logistically, for Red, this might not be quite as bad as it initially looks. I would guess there are only three sensors for the six cameras, and equivalent Epic and Scarlet models have the same sensors. That is, the S35 Epic probably has the same sensor as the S35 Scarlet. On top of this, you’d then have two different electronics packages, one of which can process over three times as many frames a second.

This does make the pricing structure seem rather strange, at first glance. It’s a little hard to see spending over $20,000 more just for electronics that can process frames faster.

Red doesn’t strike me as the sort of company that sets up completely artificial pricing tiers like this, so this got me thinking about just what might be going on here, and I think I’ve got a plausible answer. Mind you, I know absolutely nothing about manufacturing image sensors. But I am a bit familiar with how the CPU market works.

You’ll often see CPU vendors like Intel offering the same chip at 10 different clock speeds (GHz ratings). The reason this happens is because the manufacturing process is inconsistent, particularly for the latest and greatest chips. After each chip is made, it gets tested at higher and higher speeds until it becomes unstable. Once that happens, it gets marked at its highest stable speed, and sold as a chip with that specification. Its price reflects what fraction of chips rolling off the line are capable of reaching that speed.

What I’m getting at here is, Intel doesn’t set out to make the chip at many different clock speeds, but that’s what happens, and they have to offer products based around that natural variability.

If the same thing is true of image sensors, it could explain both the large price difference between equivalent Scarlet and Epic models, and the reason why Red offers so many models to begin with. If only one in ten chips from the factory can operate at 100 frames per second, Red would be nuts to throw out all the other nine — maybe 8 of them can still operate at 30 frames per second, so why not build a camera around that spec? That’s the Scarlet. At the same time, if you have that one chip in ten, why stick it in a camera that only operates at 30 frames/sec when you can use it as the basis for a lower volume but higher margin product? That’s the Epic.

Now, take into account that Red wanted to offer both S35 (for traditional cinema-style shooting) and FF35 (for people from the stills world), as well as 2/3″ cameras for the low-budget market, and you end up with five or six models as the minimum. But if my speculation above is correct, rather than being a liability, having two versions of the camera for each format is practically a necessity.

(Once again, I have no idea if any of this actually applies to image sensors, etc. etc.)