Camera Class

I can remember the buzz of excitement when news flashed through the NAB Show newsroom that Blackmagic Design had announced a digital cinema camera. Long known for producing excellent signal processing, conversion and measuring equipment, the aggressive video company from Australia had hidden its secret so well that when the 2.5K (2432 x 1366) camera with built-in SSD recorder was unveiled at its press conference in the Las Vegas Convention Center, the international media and NAB Show visitors didn’t know what to think.

Many cinematographers have opined that Nikon brought out the video-enabled D800 in response to the popularity of video capabilities in the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Or maybe the D800 was inspired by the fact that the D7000, Nikon’s first HDSLR capable of 1080/24p video, wasn’t received as warmly as Nikon would have liked. (Of course, the initial lack of D7000 supplies caused in part by the October 2010 flooding of some Nikon plants in Thailand didn’t help its introduction.)

The great irony of JVC’s new GY-HMQ10 camera is that you can easily spend far more on a display device to see the 4K images it records than the camera itself costs. (The camera is priced at just under $5,000.) JVC describes the GY-HMQ10 as “the world’s first handheld camcorder capable of capturing and recording real-time video at four times the resolution of full HD (3840 x 2160) images at 24p, 50p and 60p.”