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 cameras. Nikon bought RED for the cinema brand prestige. The original pioneer in digital cinema, is now apparently too unimportant to deserve a proper RED badge on the front of the Nikon Zr, the first Cinema Z camera which is less Hollywood, more vlogger.
Strange as it may seem, I am currently a RED user.
Yes there’s been dark things in the past, abusive lawsuits, unkind words and even unkinder YouTube videos but EOSHD has a RED EPIC sitting on the shelf. I want to sell it… 2000 euros for those interested. But that’s besides the point…
RED was one of cinema’s most valuable brands. Nikon’s deal to buy the pioneers of digital Hollywood cinematography was a decision Panasonic should have taken. A masterstroke, which gives them the best RAW codec license-free and the best brand. What’s more 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 cheapening 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 cinematic statement. Canon have already done so… long, long ago, when in late 2011 Martin Scorsese appeared on stage introducing the Cinema EOS C300. This was a proper cinema camera, aimed at indies and docus and even TV crews.
Nikon’s debut with Cinema Z is a strange one, they have entered not cinema but content creation.
The Sony ZV1E-look-alike is a significantly less Hollywood, more consumer-point&shoot camera than the latest Canon hybrid… which actually bothers to uses the word “Cinema” properly in its name, the Cinema EOS C50. The Zr 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.
Will we be getting a higher-end ZR8 soon?
Unless they quickly follow-up with something more exciting, with the RED badge actually on it more prominently, 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 like Hasselblad in 2025… a patent holder for an Asian corporation, and a badge for some colour profiles.
It’s not that the Nikon Zr is a terrible camera, it’s a similar concept to what I wanted RED to make way back in 2012 in the DSLR video days.
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” camera does not have quite the same value.
