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CALL 2009 THE YEAR of convergence, the point at which each frame produced by a movie camera came to have more resolution than any photo in this magazine. Red Digital Cinema, started in 2006 by Oakley Eyewear founder Jim Jannard, is set to release two breakthrough digicams, the Scarlet and the Epic, later this year. The new devices will change the way everything from feature films to action sports to nature shows are shot.
Both the Scarlet and Epic are small—three pounds, and no bigger than a home video recorder—yet the high-end Epic model makes movies with better resolution than a 200-plus-pound Imax film camera, while the consumer-level Scarlet is nearly as good as the cameras used to shoot Hollywood features. And both cost a fraction of their competition, from $3,000 for the base-model Scarlet up to $53,000 for the Imax-beating Epic. If you’re used to shopping for digital still cameras by megapixels—a good one now gets 10 to 20—consider that the Epic shoots up to 260. That’s not an incremental shift; it’s like releasing the iPhone in 1980.