Red One: The HD Camera
CES 2008 is over and now it's up to us to figure out which gizmos are next on our list of Must Have items. Even though I've been a life-long Canon customer, I was sorely tempted by the Casio Exilim Pro EX-F1 that the company says can shoot 60 still images per second with 6MP resolution. Wow! But what if the action lasts more than a single second? And what if you want 2x the resolution so that you can show off the full capabilities of your new 150" Panasonic TH46PXZ850, with it's 4K by 2K resolution? You need a 4K camera, and that's been hard to find in a consumer-sized format. Until now.
I've written often about the ways technology has changed my life and my perspective, from the clock radio (which introduced me to popular music) to the QWERTY keyboard (a true anachronism, but better than flipping dip switches) to the XO laptop, an integrated marvel that still boggles a mind that thought a 32x32 video card supporting 16 colors was pretty darned cool
But this is 2008, and 30-odd years of Moore's Law have really raised the stakes of what's dazzling. The RED ONE camera sports a 12MP Mysterium image processor that shoots 4Kx2K native resolution with 12-bit color (66dB or 11 f-stop dynamic range). Let's do some math: 12MP * 12 bits/pixel = 144 Mbits, divided by 215 (15 doublings for the 30 years) = 4395 bits. Multiply that by 1 Pixel per 4 bits (of the Cromemco TV Dazzler) and you get 1098 4-bit pixels. If that were square it would be 33x33—the very resolution that dazzled my mind when I first saw video coming from our IMSAI 8080 computer. But there's more to the RED ONE than mere megapixels.
Attach a lens, grips, tripod rails, grab some lights and you are ready to make movies that can be projected on screens 60 feet wide. Get yourself a 300mm f/2.8 telephoto and really capture the action at the next soccer game. After all, if we want our home movies to be remotely cool 30 years into the future, the very least we can do is buy into what technology has to offer today.
I know what you're thinking: that's got to be an expensive camera! And in some ways, yes it is. But in other ways, it's not. At $17,500, it costs less than my Toyota Prius did in 2003. And you could buy three cameras for the cost of a single CD player. Such a deal!
Full 4K resolution @ 30 fps. 100 minutes of RAW 4K with 320GB SATA disk media. 90 minutes of recording time per battery charge. 4 channel, 24-bit audio @ 48kHz. Less than 10 lbs. The big school production is in a few months. If only they had a driver for Fedora right now...otherwise it's perfect, and I want one. NOW!
Michael Tiemann is president of the Open Source Initiative and vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
Though I will say, looks like a nice camera. And if you are looking to produce studio quality films... that would be the way to go.
But for now. I'll go pick up a hi-8 for cheap.
First of all, 4K is actually 4x the resolution of HD not double. Second, the Red camera is not a full finished product and likely never will be according to the manufacturer. Red also uses a lossy compression on their Bayer-pattered "4K" image. Resulting in resolution at nearly the same as current HD. In fact tests recently made public by a big time DP, showed that a 1920x1080 HD camera actually had more resolution. RED said they will get uncompressed images eventually, but no one knows when that will be, even RED. I saw what they considered to be the "finest projection of their images", and it looked good, but not like 4K.
While the RED camera body costs $17,500. Adding Batteries a viewfinder, some place to put the data will drive the cost of the camera upwards for $50K.
So getting down to the 'Real World tests'. The Red is showing about 8-stops of dynamic range, not 11. When you factor in and the approximate 2.5K (real world performance) it costs you 50+x the $800 Canon HV20, and the biggest difference is you get no auto-focus and less depth of field meaning you won't want to use this for babies first step or that taping that "school production" of Grease. Oh, and $49K worth of debt.
I hope I didn't throw to much cold water on this camera. The new Panasonic and Sony 4K displays will have beautiful 4K images, but those images will come from film, a company called DALSA, or one of the other manufacturers when they start releasing their 4K cameras.
-M