Eric Calabros

Was this guy responsible for the genius idea of putting a CFE card inside Red mini mag and charge 10x?

The reality about disruptive products is that most of the time its not sustainable way of releasing new products. You can't stay disruptive long term. Japanese do care a lot about cash flow. Thats why they have 100 years old companies.

Different pixel sizes, probably different pixel fill factor, different AA filters, different resolving power in lenses used. You should make sure all of these are equal in your comparison, then discuss about the difference in algorithms and processing strategies.

6k60p at 16:9 and 6k30p open gate was mentioned in almost all different rumors.

RED stays RED, for now.

The reality is if you lift the shadows in both Z9 and A1 "uncompressed" raw images, at base ISO, you get different results. If you do demosaicing on A1 images, and apply temporal NR, you get even more different result. If Nikon ditch the NRAW, its probably related to license costs, not the quality of the codec.

And yet Z9 is the noisier one:

For comparing two different codecs, you have to use the same or similar sensors.

I really want to "own nothing and be happy" but I'm not sure about the second half of that sentence.

It isn't for everybody because there is no high compression, yet. NRAW supports 12:1 or 1 bit per pixel. Its just 600mb/s for 6k30p, but Nikon's current options are only 4.5:1 and 7.5:1.

"In my opinion, the enthusiasm is because Atomos have a chance with Nikon to renegotiate or nullify their onerous licensing agreement for RAW recording. The agreement with RED in 2019 was necessary as Atomos were being sued for the use of compressed RAW codecs like ProRes RAW in their portable recorders, so now have to pay RED royalties on every sale (although the exact terms of the deal aren’t public)." But if Nikon decides to Not defend RED patent, there will be a lot of cameras in the market with internal raw. Canon will introduce 8:1 compression, Sony will introduce a new Sony-exclusive raw codec and call it XcR, Panasonic S5m3 will record ProresRAW. And then, who would need/buy a monitor recorder?

New but not unexpected rumors: - The Nikon Z6III camera announcement may have something to do with the RED acquisition. - We should expect some kind of a Nikon/RED announcement at the 2024 NAB show next month (maybe the Z6III?). ----- I still think its too early for any RED+Nikon development, but Expeed7 doing R3D is the lowest hanging fruit.

Nikon is going to release a Komodo competitor next month: Z6m3 with 6k30p raw 😄

I'm not sure pixel shield PDAF IP is totally owned by Sony, since Nikon has a lot of patents related to that technique. Of course many cross licencing is happening in this industry. Dual gain was invented by Aptina, now part of ONsemi, which doesn't provide sensor for any of Japanese ILC makers, but everybody is using the tech. However if they want to add AF capabilities to RED, I don't think they would use pixel shield technique, cause it degrades image quality a little bit (the shielded pixel has lower S/N ratio than the rest of the pixels). Dual pixel and quad pixel is the way to go. Nikon has some interesting patents about that too. People put too much emphasis on sensor license fees. The fees are not really a big deal. The fab costs is.

This acquisition caused some discoveries: 1- Some RED users are not mentally well. I mean who on earth glue a camera, which is a tool, to his entire identity? Its insane when you think about that. It may sound judgmental but I feel few of these guys are even closet antivaxxer. 2- People in video making echo chamber have no clue about still camera industry. Example one: they don't know how popular Z8 is. Example two: they don't know a big part of Canon market share is related to its strategy of sticking to the old habit of making cheap cripple hammered bodies. Example three: they don't know how much Nikon is involved in CMOS sensor development. 3- Making "analysis" video about a corporate deal, with almost zero published details, is so easy for some of these YouTubers, that seems "Trust me bro" is not a meme anymore, but a serious way of life!