Red Cinema Cameras...?

Question

How many cameras have they made? What is their production cost per camera? What is their production rate of the Red cameras? Are the Red lenses equal or higher quality than other brands?

A quick response is grateful.

Thank you,

Jesse

Answer 1

Red digital cinema is a recently new company; it began a couple of years ago, when owner Jim Jannard announce that he was going to make a revolutionary 4K cameara out of scratch in 15 months. No one believed him, but 15 months later the RED One began shipping.

The RED One is the only camera available now, but they are in the building stages of 2 new cameras, the 5K RED EPIC, and my personal favorite, the pocket professional camera the 3K RED SCARLET.

RED ONE 4K is available now for $17,500

RED EPIC 5K and RED SCARLET are availabe in the 1st quarter of 2009

EPIC will be $40,000 and Scarlet will be $3,000

How many cameras have been made? No one knows. There are serial numbers in the 2,000s, so my guess is that's more or less the amount of cameras made. But that's not a entirely accurate premise to make any sort of good guess.

Their production cost? I have no clue, I'm sure nobody does. But I do know that they are able to keep these costs down, being such as small private company, consisting of a small handful of geniouses. Production rate? Not so fast. Out of the thousands of orders for RED One, only about $2,000 are in the hands of their owners. Should you order a RED One today, you'll probably get it in December. Remeber, they are still a small "garage operation".

But with Scarlet, RED plans to mass produce to cater to the masses.

RED LENSES: Red makes some nice quality glass. They have your typical PL mount for professional 35mm cinema lenses. They'll work just like any other 35mm lens, even better on digital cameras, because being digital, it records all the information right into the footage (aperture, focal lenght, etc) which is a real nice feature in post.

They are just as good as far as picture quality as most other 35mm lenses. It shoots full 4K on RED One, and that's as much as you need, as far as I'm concerned. 35mm lenses are just as good, but if you want 16mm lenses, or some photo lenses, you can't shoot full resolution. But the Nikon AF lenses will shoot 4K, I believe.

You can take a look at the Red user forums: http://www.reduser.net/forum/index.php

good fun....you may even get to chat with Jim and the Red team :)

Well, I hope that helps.

Answer 2

The Wikipedia article has a lot of information, mostly explaining why your questions can't be answered :-(

Production costs aren't mentioned, but I doubt if that information is in the public domain.