$20,000 Red Epic Sensor Burnt By Show Lasers
Jul 14, 2013
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Obviously this has not been a good week for expensive gear. After reporting on the $10,000 split-in-half Nikon Lens yesterday, we sadly inform that in a battle between a laser show and a $20,000 RED Epic, the laser won.
This particular RED Epic was used to shoot the Electric Daisy Carnival 2013 in Chicago where a massive display of stage lasers takes place. It took the laser not longer than a split second to change the sensor into pic collage.
Here is a comparison of how the image goes out of the RED before and after it got hit by the laser:

It is no wonder people are using lasers to hit camera sensor when wanting some privacy.
Here is a video showing how massive the laser show was (though it only took one beam to nuke the RED).
Epic puns in 3,2,1…
[Concert Lasers Destroy RED EPIC image sensor via gizmodo, forceduse]
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.

































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9 responses to “$20,000 Red Epic Sensor Burnt By Show Lasers”
EPIC!
(could not resist….)
I bet someone is seeing RED now.
(could not resist…)
“Lights in my eyes”…. Priceless.
Then again, anyone who would bring a $20,000.00 piece of anything to listen to club music.. You deserve the loss.
Why the hell would you say that? Just because you don’t like the genre of music at the festival? Using a pair of Epic’s, I would assume that they were being paid to be there, and the wider dynamic range and RAW files offered by these cameras would be a huge bonus in a dimly lit environment such as this.
70mm film never had this problem
“Obviously this has not been a good week for expensive gear.”
May 2013. November 2010.
Hardly a week.
looked crappy anyways :)
So was the Red Epic RENTED??? With such an expensive camera, I would rather rent it and have insurance cover it.
If the photographer was standing in the crowd this should not have happened and was the laser operators fault. There’s a certain height that can be set so peoples eyes dont fry like this camera did. I’ve been shooting lasers for 4 years and haven’t fried anything, but I’ve seen $15,000 of gear fry at Earthcore because the laser operator didnt set a safe distance. As you can see in the first 3 shots I’ve been standing no more then 5 meters away from lasers pointing at my camera – and because of how they were configured for the space of a nightclub, no eyesight damage, no projector lens damage and no camera damage. For arguments that the lasers aren’t powerful enough, we had two lasers that can burn holes THROUGH fabric if you set them wrong, tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, and because everything was mapped and set correctly everyone walked away happy.