Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Canon’s EOS R and EOS RP cameras haven’t quite seen the widespread adoption that they’d hoped for amongst users, although it looks like they might soon get a little assistance from RED. Newsshooter reported a teaser for the new RED Komodo camera.
It was mentioned that RED would be posting about the new camera soon, after having recently announced the Hydrogen 2 smartphone. Very little is really known about it, but looking at a teaser image posted, it’s going to have a Canon RF lens mount.
The promotion leading up to the release of the RED Hydrogen One was largely a hype-fuelled campaign that ended up disappointing a whole lot of people. Particularly people who’d actually put money down to buy one. After delays, and even giving out freebies, it still wasn’t enough to keep people happy, so RED seemed to quietly pull the plug.
Now it seems, though, that RED is up for round 2 and taking another crack at the smartphone market with the RED Hydrogen 2. A post from RED (and Oakley sunglasses) founder Jim Jannard on the H4VUser website admits the issues with the Hydrogen One and announced the commencement of work on the Hydrogen 2.
Shooting for yourself is something I talk about a lot, I talk about it a lot but I have struggled to do over the last 12 months.
In 2016 I shot maybe 20-30 shoots which were for myself to try new skills, develop my work and give myself a break for the paid work I was doing.
In 2017 I did only 4 shoots like this. Now a little of that is because I was a victim of my own success, my commercial work grew massively and became my biggest photography year on earnings and hours worked. This meant my own personal work had to take a little bit of a back seat. Well not a little, it wasn’t even in the back seat, it was left at home in a cupboard which was locked and nailed shut!
After a pretty abysmal launch, the RED Hydrogen One had one possible saving grace that might help see it succeed and allow RED to redeem themselves in the eyes of their customers. Not to mention the entire smartphone-buying public. That one thing was its expandability. Modules that allow the user to enhance the functionality of the device.
Now, RED seems to have silently scrapped those modules, including the camera module, after removing all traces of them from the Hydrogen One website. The change was spotted by Reddit user ReipasTietokonePoku, where it sparked off quite the discussion between owners of the phone.
You might remember that a couple of years ago, Linus Tech Tips spent a somewhat insane $138,000 on a couple of 8K RED cameras & accessories. Well, like most of us after having a camera for this amount of time, they’re starting to notice some of the annoying quirks of their camera.
In this case, the loudness of it between takes as the fan kicks into overdrive. So, they decided to try and switch it over from fans to water cooling.
RED’s entry into the world of smartphones was supposed to be exciting. As one of the leaders in cinema cameras, everybody expected the RED Hydrogen One to be a magical video powerhouse of a phone. Now that they’ve started shipping, though, some customers aren’t quite so impressed with what they’ve received for their money.
These review from The Verge, Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) along with some real live sample footage shot with the Hydrogen One show that it really doesn’t live up to what users were expecting.
You know we’re at peak levels of crazy when somebody shoves 16 8K RED Helium sensors into a single camera. But that’s exactly what Facebook and RED have done with the new Manifold 360 camera.
Designed for “immersive cinematography”, the Manifold allows RAW video capture from all 16 cameras at 8K resolution and 60 frames per second each simultaneously. Oh yeah, it’s way out there.
RED recently simplified its camera lineup to three separate product lines. Monstro, Helium and Gemini. But how do the three new systems all stack up against each other? That’s what Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and filmmaker Vincent Laforet wanted to find out. So, he got all three cameras and took them out to compare them side-by-side and see for himself where the limits were.
You may look at this post and think “I’ll never own a RED camera, why should I care?” but Vincent’s message here is clear. It’s not that we all need RED cameras, or to show off his fancy cameras. It’s to demonstrate that we all need to test our camera’s limitations. We need to know what those limits are, where and how we can push them, and when we definitely can’t.
If you’ve always wanted to buy a RED camera and have been saving up – now may be the right time to get it. The company has announced that they’re dropping prices on all of its cameras, and you can save up to $25,000. Additionally, RED is simplifying their product lineup and it will offer only three cameras.
The release of RED’s new Hydrogen One holographic smartphone is drawing ever closer. We’ve known about its modular connectivity through the pogo pins on the back, but very little has been said about what they’re for. It’s been suggested that we’d perhaps see battery packs or small camera modules to use “real” lenses and that it may offer communication with RED’s range of cameras.
Well, the first of those cameras has been announced. RED has teamed up with a 3D VR camera company, Lucid on an 8K prosumer 3D camera. A camera not only shoots holographic content that can be viewed on the Hydrogen One but a camera which also uses the Hydrogen One as its “viewfinder” while shooting.
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