Nikon are a strange company, and you could say that Japan is a strange country. Having made cameras for 100 years, you’d think Nikon would know a thing or two about marketing them. Nikon bought RED for the cinema prestige. The trailblazer in digital cinema, now apparently is too unimportant to even get a RED badge on the Nikon Zr, a cheap Youtuber’s camera.
Strange as it may seem, I am currently a RED user.
There’s been dark things in the past, lawsuits, unkind words and even unkinder YouTube videos but EOSHD has a RED EPIC sitting on the shelf. I want to sell it… 1500 euros for those interested. But that’s besides the point…
RED is one of cinema’s most valuable brands. Nikon’s deal to buy the pioneers of digital Hollywood cinematography was a masterstroke, and RED sold at the right time – just as the cinema industry headed into a death spiral.
But Nikon’s first hybrid stills/video camera with RED tech, the soon to be announced Nikon Zr is a flagrant humiliation of the once great cinema brand.
With this first Nikon x RED camera (x as in kisses?), the Japanese corporation had the chance to make a big statement. Canon have already done so…a long, long time ago, when in late 2011 Martin Scorsese appeared on stage introducing the C300. This was a proper cinema camera, aimed at indies and docus and even TV crews.
Nikon’s entry to the cinema market is a strange one, as they have entered not cinema but content creation.
The Sony ZV1E-look-alike is a significantly less cinema more consumer-point&shoot camera than the latest Canon hybrid… which actually bothers to uses the word “Cinema” in it’s name, the C50. It seems to strip back on what made the Sony FX3 and soon the Canon C50 so popular with video people…
High spec, high build quality, serious looks, and Cinema branding (and cinema usage in terms of the FX3 in feature-film production).
This makes me think Nikon does not have a good plan for RED, and indeed does not know how to market the brand.
Unless they quickly follow-up with a proper RED-Nikon branded camera, with the RED badge actually on it, with headline specs that are at least Z8-level, with 8K REDCODE RAW at 60fps and 4K 120fps without a crop, the RED brand risks becoming a big like Hasselblad… a patent holder, a bit of colour science, and a badge for point & shoot smartphones.
It’s not that the Nikon Zr is a terrible camera, although it is more expensive than the Z6 III without an EVF…
It’s just that the reborn, revitalised Japanese version of RED deserved to hit the headlines with a big splash and a big dollop of CINEMA.
“Content creator” does not have quite the same aura does it?
