I’m sure this post will get some flack, but I really do think that Blackmagics marketing of the BMD Cinema Camera is pushing the boundaries of whats fair and reasonable. This isn’t a criticism of the camera itself, which for the money is a great deal and I’m curious to see how it really performs in the wild. This is a criticism of some of the over inflated statements that BMD are making about it.
In a recent magazine article it’s quoted that according to Blackkmagic “the Cinema Camera has been designed to eliminate the problems of….. …. limited contrast range, a maximum of an HD sensor, poor quality optics and lenses and poor integration with NLE software… …. with these limitations they cannot (the competition) be used for high end work or feature films”
Come on BMD, who are you trying to fool, do you think your potential customers are really stupid enough to fall for that statement? For a start 13 stops of dynamic range can be achieved with many current cameras. The BMD camera is no more than HD itself, the sensor is bayer, so even though it has 2.43K pixels (it doesn’t even have the headline 2.5K), the resolution is still only more or less HD. It has a Canon mount so will often be using exactly the same lenses as much of the competition and every NLE worth having these days works perfectly well with all the common codecs like AVCHD, XDCAM or AVC-Intra. Try using ProRes (as used by the BMD along with DNxHD and DNG) on a PC, it gets truncated to 8 bits and there is no way to render back to ProRes. By their own account the BMD camera is no more suitable for high end work than most of the competition. In the past I’ve come across senior BMD sales reps that have tried to sell me the camera because “it’s 2.5K which is so much better than HD”. When I’ve challenged this all I’ve got is.. “umm, I don’t know the answer to that, I need to discuss it with the factory”. Come on Blackmagic. Don’t treat us like fools, many of us do actually understand all this stuff. You have a good product at a great price, don’t use ridiculous over inflated statements that don’t hold water, it makes you sound like dodgy used car salesmen. Sell it for what it is, a very low cost HD camera that can shoot raw with interchangable lenses.