Blackmagic Cinema Camera Unveiled

I walk onto the NAB 2012 show floor this morning to be greeted by a new Blackmagic Cinema Camera.  It certainly doesn’t look like other cinema cameras on the market; however, it’s a very intriguing camera on its own.

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera features 2.5K RAW (2432 x 1366) capture or compressed 1920 x 1080 HD capture.  Available frame rates are 23.98p, 24p, 25p, 29.97p and 30p.  The sensor is 16.64mm x 14.04mm with an active area of 15.6 x 8.8mm.

The display is a 5″ LCD is at 800 x 480 resolution with capacitive touchscreen control.   The lens mount is EF and ZF mount compatible with electronic iris control.

Video is recorded to a removable 2.5” SSD that is formatted to Mac OS Extended format. (SSDs can be formatted on any Mac or use Mediafour MacDrive (not included) on a Windows PC.)

Storage rates are 5 MB/frame in RAW using 2.5K CinemaDNG (2.5K fits about 30 minutes of 24p video on a 256 GB solid state disk.)

Compressed HD formats (Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD) fit more than 5 times the amount of RAW video.  (All compressed recording in 1920×1080 10-bit YUV with choice of Film or Video Dynamic Range.)

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is priced at $2995.