It's hard to overestimate the way RED has brought quality digital cameras into the hands of people who are working on low- to medium-budgeted films, series and

It's hard to overestimate the way RED has brought quality digital cameras into the hands of people who are working on low- to medium-budgeted films, series and commercials. For me though, the game changers were cameras like Thomson Viper and the Arri D-20. Tangent: Around 2005/2006 I worked on the software for a HD-SDI field recorder that could be used to record the raw output coming out of these cameras. We had to use a big RAID array just to be able to sustain the data rates (dual link HD-SDI is about 370Mb/sec). The thing weighed a ton and was probably considered luggable, just like your Osborne-1. The quality that came out of these cameras was really awesome though. Viper was a bit noisy in low light and had an awful green tint that you needed to post-process (it was really just RAW sensor output) but it looked stunning. Fast forward just a couple of years and RED came out with visuals that are maybe slightly worse than Arri's but much, much cheaper. And nowadays companies like Codex and Atomos have tiny form-factor recorders that record to flash storage that weighs a couple of grams. It's really amazing to see the progress.