FEATURE | NEW CAMERAS
RED RANGERS One camera range that is pointedly not selling a full-frame option is Red’s Ranger series. A Ranger camera with the company’s Monstro full-frame sensor, available only to rental houses, had emerged earlier in 2019. At IBC, however, Red announced the Helium and Gemini sensors would be available for sale in the Ranger chassis. As a departure from the modular DSMC series, Ranger is an integrated body design that weighs about 3.5kg and records Red’s usual selection of its own proprietary codec and, optionally simultaneously, ProRes. The choice between Helium, at 8192 x 3456, and Gemini, at 5120 x 2700, is more or less a statement of the core compromise of modern camera design. Both cameras have sensors just a little larger than the traditional Super35 camera aperture, and it’s been shown in the past that 8K is a lot of photosites to fit on a fairly small area of silicon; the Gemini is therefore a nice choice to have. Helium achieves 60fps when recording the whole sensor, Gemini 96fps. The company claims 16.5 stops of dynamic range for both, though that’s a rather larger claim even than some cameras with considerably less dense sensors. CHRONOS To finish on something completely different, consider the Chronos camera line from Kron Technologies. For a long time, the company’s Chronos 1.4 camera has been beloved of the YouTube generation and its fascination with things slowly exploding. The 1.4 camera, while capable, is limited to 1280 x 1024 resolution at 1057fps, and resolution falls off with frame rate, with an approximately standard-definition 640 x 480 image affording up to 4436fps. The Chronos 1.4 was therefore never really a tool for film and TV work, if YouTube is meanly excluded from that category.
IMAGES Red has announced Helium and Gemini sensors available in a Ranger body
It’s been shown in the past that 8K is a lot of photosites to fit on a fairly small area of silicon, so the Gemini is a nice choice to have
scoff, but the Chronos 2.1 is on pre-order for $5000 and that is not a price point at which established high-speed cameras really compete. Away from the specialist area of high speed, though, productions willing to exchange the focus puller’s sanity for a full-frame sensor have a lot of options, and all those options have plenty of room for big photosites that keep images quiet, and make for high dynamic range. If what I’ve just described sounds like something we’ve all heard before, though, consider this – do you remember when Super35 sensors were considered big chip?
So, it was a product begging for an update. That update emerged at IBC in the form of the Chronos 2.1, a camera with a four-thirds-inch sensor capable of shooting HD images at up to 1000fps. There are 8, 16 and 32GB recording options for up to 11 seconds of record time, and the company advertises a 500 ISO sensitivity for the colour version. With high-speed cameras sometimes struggling for light, the monochrome version – where the omission of the colour filters lets all the light hit the sensor – will make sense for scientific applications. Yes, regular users of Vision Research’s Phantom range will
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