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It would be kind of cool Nikon is able to bring the price of RED cameras down. I've wanted a truly professional-grade camera for awhile, but I cannot justify sp

It would be kind of cool Nikon is able to bring the price of RED cameras down. I've wanted a truly professional-grade camera for awhile, but I cannot justify spending $10k-20k for something that would fundamentally be a glorified toy to me (since I don't do anything professional with camera). I was hoping that pro-grade 4k cameras would drop to the sub-$500 mark by now, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Even the comparatively cheaper Blackmagic Pocket Cinema cameras are on the order of $2,000-$3,000. I guess the engineering for cameras that nice has fairly high "minimum cost" that can't easily be brought down by industrialization?

atonse 3y ago
Isn't 10k already pretty budget price for a _professional_ video camera? Like film class. At least the film ones (like ARRI Alexa) approach 100k and can be rented as a result. I think the panavision ones were even more back in the day, but not 100% sure.
- tombert 3y ago
  That's fair, but using computers as an analogy: a professional-grade computer from the 90's (e.g. a Silicon Graphics machine) used in professional films would cost like $40,000, but now you can buy something orders of magnitude more powerful than a 90's era SGI workstation for peanuts; virtually any modern gaming rig made in the last 15 years or will outperform even a top of the line SGI from 1995, because computer hardware prices have benefited enormously from industrialization. I realize it's not apples to apples, but I first heard about the Red One 4k in 2008, about 16 years ago, but it doesn't feel like prices have dropped in the same way that computer prices have. In fact, it's hard to even get a used one from 2008 for less than a grand right now. I'm not even claiming that it's overpriced, not everything can drop to near-zero-margins like computer hardware can and make up for it in scale. I just really want to use a pro-grade camera and I don't want to spend $10+k to do it.
  - atonse 3y ago
    Yeah the Reds are really nice, but I (a consumer) haven't been able to tell the difference between what a RED can do and what, say, a $7k SLR type camera could do, film-wise. So honestly not sure if there is a market of people who can tell a difference between those AND people that are looking to cut costs on the camera because their film crew's time would be much more expensive. (Mostly thinking out loud, doesn't intuitively add up to me.)
    - tombert 3y ago
      Absolutely; if you're a movie studio buying a new pro camera ever five years, it doesn't really matter what the camera costs. You can very easily buy a new camera for basically any price, and it'll still be like .01% of the cost of the budget.
Swizec 3y ago
> I guess the engineering for cameras that nice has fairly high "minimum cost" that can't easily be brought down by industrialization? It may be a value thing. Why would you sell a $500 toy to the consumer market who are un-fun customers to deal with, if you could sell the same thing to a professional for $5000 and they won’t even blink because they can leverage that same tool into $500,000 of revenue? Plus at the $5000 price you can afford to have proper customer support, good service department, and all the other stuff that professionals value. You can make an actually better product even if the tech itself is the same. And you don’t need to play silly expensive consumer marketing games. Focus on making great cameras and the professionals will market among themselves.
- tombert 3y ago
  Totally fair, I guess I was hoping it would be like servers. New servers are also super expensive, and don't directly market to consumer, but their used value is basically nothing. You can buy a used server on eBay, even with relatively nice specs for a consumer, for less than a grand, often substantially less than a grand (mine was $150 for 128gb of RAM and 24 cores). It doesn't appear that pro-grade cameras fall the same way though.
  - Swizec 3y ago
    > It doesn't appear that pro-grade cameras fall the same way though I wonder if cameras are just too durable and don’t need to be upgraded as often? Even a consumer camera will last you roughly forever in my experience. I still use a DSLR from 2015 that works great and does everything I need.
    - tombert 3y ago
      Yeah, I think that's the thing. The reason that companies liquidate servers for so cheap is because nearly any large company that buys a server would always benefit from a server that's any amount better. e.g. If you can push 10% more trades, that roughly correlates directly to profits, so the relative cost of "just buying a new server" is nothing. A nice 4k (and especially 8k) camera, on the otherhand, is likely "good enough" for a lot longer. A studio can probably get a lot more value out of a 10 year old Red One than a trading company can get from a 10 year old server, so there's not really the constant need to upgrade your camera every year or two. Also, it would be worth considering that a new camera would (I assume) require a bit more learning on the operators part, since there might be subtle differences between color grading and compression and the like. A server, on the other hand, is somewhat standardized; Linux is basically Linux, if you're running the same OS you're getting basically the same experience, so the process of upgrading is pretty easy.
wmf 3y ago
A Canon R100 is under $500 and probably has similar or better image quality to the CineAlta used on Star Wars 25 years ago. A ZV-E10 is slightly better for slightly more money.
pillusmany 3y ago
Pro cameras have a volume problem. Too few are sold. Imagine if Intel only sold 10000 CPUs a year, but the fabs still cost billions of dollars. Do you still think you would have $500 CPUs?
- tombert 3y ago
  No argument here. That’s where my analogy with servers falls apart; it’s not weird for large companies like Amazon or Apple to purchase thousands of servers, which they periodically need to upgrade, and thus liquidate the old ones. Simple supply and demand dictates that the more supply we have, the lower the price (generally speaking). I agree that if intel didn’t sell millions and millions of CPUs the price would definitely be much higher.
- crftr 3y ago
  Precisely. ARRI is only a viable business because they also have lighting and lenses. Sony and Canon imaging subsidize their cine lines with their high-volume consumer products.

atonse 3y ago

Isn't 10k already pretty budget price for a _professional_ video camera? Like film class. At least the film ones (like ARRI Alexa) approach 100k and can be rented as a result. I think the panavision ones were even more back in the day, but not 100% sure.

tombert 3y ago
That's fair, but using computers as an analogy: a professional-grade computer from the 90's (e.g. a Silicon Graphics machine) used in professional films would cost like $40,000, but now you can buy something orders of magnitude more powerful than a 90's era SGI workstation for peanuts; virtually any modern gaming rig made in the last 15 years or will outperform even a top of the line SGI from 1995, because computer hardware prices have benefited enormously from industrialization. I realize it's not apples to apples, but I first heard about the Red One 4k in 2008, about 16 years ago, but it doesn't feel like prices have dropped in the same way that computer prices have. In fact, it's hard to even get a used one from 2008 for less than a grand right now. I'm not even claiming that it's overpriced, not everything can drop to near-zero-margins like computer hardware can and make up for it in scale. I just really want to use a pro-grade camera and I don't want to spend $10+k to do it.
- atonse 3y ago
  Yeah the Reds are really nice, but I (a consumer) haven't been able to tell the difference between what a RED can do and what, say, a $7k SLR type camera could do, film-wise. So honestly not sure if there is a market of people who can tell a difference between those AND people that are looking to cut costs on the camera because their film crew's time would be much more expensive. (Mostly thinking out loud, doesn't intuitively add up to me.)
  - tombert 3y ago
    Absolutely; if you're a movie studio buying a new pro camera ever five years, it doesn't really matter what the camera costs. You can very easily buy a new camera for basically any price, and it'll still be like .01% of the cost of the budget.

Swizec 3y ago

> I guess the engineering for cameras that nice has fairly high "minimum cost" that can't easily be brought down by industrialization? It may be a value thing. Why would you sell a $500 toy to the consumer market who are un-fun customers to deal with, if you could sell the same thing to a professional for $5000 and they won’t even blink because they can leverage that same tool into $500,000 of revenue? Plus at the $5000 price you can afford to have proper customer support, good service department, and all the other stuff that professionals value. You can make an actually better product even if the tech itself is the same. And you don’t need to play silly expensive consumer marketing games. Focus on making great cameras and the professionals will market among themselves.

tombert 3y ago
Totally fair, I guess I was hoping it would be like servers. New servers are also super expensive, and don't directly market to consumer, but their used value is basically nothing. You can buy a used server on eBay, even with relatively nice specs for a consumer, for less than a grand, often substantially less than a grand (mine was $150 for 128gb of RAM and 24 cores). It doesn't appear that pro-grade cameras fall the same way though.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > It doesn't appear that pro-grade cameras fall the same way though I wonder if cameras are just too durable and don’t need to be upgraded as often? Even a consumer camera will last you roughly forever in my experience. I still use a DSLR from 2015 that works great and does everything I need.
  - tombert 3y ago
    Yeah, I think that's the thing. The reason that companies liquidate servers for so cheap is because nearly any large company that buys a server would always benefit from a server that's any amount better. e.g. If you can push 10% more trades, that roughly correlates directly to profits, so the relative cost of "just buying a new server" is nothing. A nice 4k (and especially 8k) camera, on the otherhand, is likely "good enough" for a lot longer. A studio can probably get a lot more value out of a 10 year old Red One than a trading company can get from a 10 year old server, so there's not really the constant need to upgrade your camera every year or two. Also, it would be worth considering that a new camera would (I assume) require a bit more learning on the operators part, since there might be subtle differences between color grading and compression and the like. A server, on the other hand, is somewhat standardized; Linux is basically Linux, if you're running the same OS you're getting basically the same experience, so the process of upgrading is pretty easy.

wmf 3y ago

A Canon R100 is under $500 and probably has similar or better image quality to the CineAlta used on Star Wars 25 years ago. A ZV-E10 is slightly better for slightly more money.

pillusmany 3y ago

Pro cameras have a volume problem. Too few are sold. Imagine if Intel only sold 10000 CPUs a year, but the fabs still cost billions of dollars. Do you still think you would have $500 CPUs?

tombert 3y ago
No argument here. That’s where my analogy with servers falls apart; it’s not weird for large companies like Amazon or Apple to purchase thousands of servers, which they periodically need to upgrade, and thus liquidate the old ones. Simple supply and demand dictates that the more supply we have, the lower the price (generally speaking). I agree that if intel didn’t sell millions and millions of CPUs the price would definitely be much higher.
crftr 3y ago
Precisely. ARRI is only a viable business because they also have lighting and lenses. Sony and Canon imaging subsidize their cine lines with their high-volume consumer products.