Hasta La Gadget!

Well, this is a trade-show first. Red Digital Cinema has made a name for itself by pushing the limits when it comes to motion picture camera technology, but the company’s “get it done” approach is even evident in the layout of its trade show booth this year. The team has constructed a full sterile lab here at NAB, where attendees can watch technicians upgrade Epic cameras with the new Dragon 6K sensor, which enables 6K shooting at 6144 x 3160 pixels and up to 100 frames-per-second, offering three additional stops over the Epic M-X. A wall of glass separates fans from the engineers in the clearly visible clean room, who are diligently going about their duties despite the constant gaggle of excited customers just a few feet away. Company spokesman Ted Schilowitz gave us a quick tour of the facility, where the $8,500+ sensor upgrades are now underway. Geek out with us in the video just past the break.

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A sub-$1,000 price tag makes any product a relative steal on the floor of NAB — impressive specs and industry standard compatibility are just icing on the cake. If such figures are any indication, however, Blackmagic’s new Pocket Cinema Camera, which leaked earlier today and ships in July, is potentially a very solid buy at $995, with a Super-16 Cinema 1080HD sensor with 13 stops of dynamic range, CinemaDNG RAW recording, SD card storage, Micro HDMI monitoring and a Micro Four Thirds lens mount. We got an early look at the shooter on the showroom floor, and the compact size is truly striking — the body is comparable in size to any other mirrorless camera, though it definitely pushes the limits of what we’d consider pocketable. The design is very similar to Blackmagic’s larger Cinema Camera launched at last year’s NAB, with the same Micro Four Thirds lens mount. There’s a very sharp built-in matte LCD for viewing footage and adjusting settings, and the build is quite solid — it’s significantly heavier than you’d expect.

Naturally, the camera isn’t as capable as Blackmagic’s pricier NAB model, the Production Camera 4K, which also made its debut today and ships in July. With that flavor, $3,995 buys you a Super 35 sensor with native Ultra HD and 4K support, a built-in SSD recorder, compressed CinemaDNG RAW and compatibility with EF lenses. We spent a few minutes with that model as well, and were equally impressed. The screen was very bright, sharp and not at all reflective, and the camera includes your standard array of inputs and outputs, including dual mic jacks, an SDI port, power and control. Both models are very competitively priced, as you might expect from Blackmagic, and with this wide range of appeal, there’s now a little something for everyone. Be sure to head past the break to check out our hands-on video as we take a closer look at both models.

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At its NAB 2013 press conference, Sony told us several times that it never stops thinking about the future. It’s fitting, then, that in addition to announcing pricing for two 4K sets, the company gave us a taste of what’s to come a few years down the line. A wide variety of lenses, including both current models and some prototypes, appeared on stage briefly — behind ropes, no less — and while we got no shortage of shots, specs, model names and any other particulars were strictly off-limits. Current optics included basic wide-angle and telephoto models, and of the two prototype cameras on display, one was of particular interest, due in no small part to its DSLR-like form-factor — this could perhaps become Sony’s version of the Canon EOS-1D C. Unfortunately, Sony says that these devices won’t make it to market for quite some time, so photogs will have to make do with this eye candy for now.

Filed under: Cameras, Sony

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Word that Google had decided to fork WebKit and build its own rendering engine is still echoing through the spidery halls of the internet. The true ramifications aren’t entirely clear yet, but Opera has pledged to embrace Blink and WebKit is already talking about removing Chrome-specific code from its repositories. This doesn’t necessarily indicate a seismic shift in the industry, but it certainly suggests that we won’t be looking at a world so thoroughly dominated by the direct descendant of KHTML. At least at first, the new entrant won’t actually deviate much from WebKit. Primarily the focus will be on stripping away unnecessary code and files to streamline the rendering engine specifically for Chrome. Obviously, this won’t prevent other developers from using Blink, since the project is open source. But Google has been pretty up front about the rationale behind the fork — the multi-process architecture favored by Chromium-based projects is quite different than that used in other WebKit browsers. This has, to put it in the plainest terms possible, kinda gummed up the works.

Blink is about 10 weeks away from landing in the stable version of Chrome (it’s expected to be turned on by default in version 28), but it’s already available as part of the Canary build. We downloaded the experimental browser and spent some time with it in an effort to identify what, if anything, was different. Keep reading after the break to find out just what Google has bought by shedding some of WebKit’s baggage.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Since I’m at Imaging Week in Seoul/Korea this week, I thought that I would spend some hands-on time with the Canon EOS 6D that was announced recently. I use a Canon 50D on a daily basis, so it’s nice to see how far Canon has gone since I bought the 50D back in the days. The Canon EOS 6D is quite different: it’s a full-frame DSLR, which makes it a much more affordable full-frame option when compared to its EOS 5D Mark III cousin. At the same time, it integrates elements from the Canon EOS 60D when it comes to the controls and overall layout, so this makes it a DSLR worthy of attention. (more…)

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