RED announces loads of stuff

Check out the massive jpeg announcement, or just head to red.com for the full deal.

While I’m sure I’ll return to my usual cynical self soon, I must say I like the modular camera idea they’re really promoting with this new batch of announcements. Buy the block, then add on all the accessories necessary, and later swap the block.

Oh, and it wouldn’t be a RED announcement without a bit of “WTF?” insanity, so here you go – 28k camera that shoots 260 megapixel stills, coming in 2010. Word.

Panasonic announces nifty P2 deck

The AG-HPG20 is a portable deck which takes HD-SDI input and lays it down to P2 cards in either DVCProHD or AVCIntra formats. Unless you’re Convergent Design, this is in the category of Hella Cool. They don’t explicitly say whether it’ll run on batteries, but hopefully if they call it “portable,” it will.

AVCIntra is my Compressed HD Format Of Choice, if all else was equal (vendor support, etc). My dream would be a device like this that went to SXS instead of P2, but we can’t have everything all at once. 4:2:2, full raster i-frame only compression at 100mbit? Hotness.

Flip goes High Def

The Wall Street Journal has the first review of the new Flip MinoHD, a 720p upgrade to the popular Flip Mino camera. This is the first serious competition to the Kodak Zi6 (damnit Amazon, ship mine already!) with the advantage of onboard storage and built in rechargeable batteries. The MinoHD also apparently sports much improved onboard software for working with your video, though “much improved” from the old stuff doesn’t say too much …

Unfortunately the review doesn’t have any native video from the camera, so it’s hard to really judge the camera quality. One of the biggest downsides they mention is the lack of a way to share the HD video … yes … if only someone had a solution

Edit: One downside I noticed in digging a bit – it’s 720p or nothing, no option to shoot natively to a lower resolution. That’s one of the things I like about the Kodak – you can do 640×480 when you don’t need the quality and just want long record times.

Panasonic Buys Sanyo

Well, I was right that Sanyo was ripe for acquisition, but I didn’t expect that Panasonic would be the ones to do it. It seems like Panasonic is more interested in the “heavy industries” parts of Sanyo – making batteries, solar panels, etc.

Here’s hoping the Xacit line doesn’t get buried – the Panasonic SD9 is right at the top of my list of least favorite consumer HD cameras.

Dear Sony: Please join us in the 21st century

Seriously – go to Sony’s HDV product page and try to figure out some distinguishing features between the Z5U, Z1U and V1U. Is the Z5U better than the Z1U? It’s cheaper, so it shouldn’t be right? At least they could fill in the ‘compare’ info…

Sony | Product Comparison Chart

Sure, if one puts in the effort, you can sort it out, but ugh. What a mess. Luckily for Sony, everyone else is just as bad.

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