schoolpost wrote:Physically, i'd expect there to be nothing other than that interchange of some internal components, ( the new SDI ) and of course the new Sensor..Other than that from that I have read, heard and seen...its near identical...
Unless it's designed to be modular like a Red, it won't be that easy. It's expensive to make a highly integrated system like a camera (or computer, for that matter) that's modular enough to be upgraded like a Red is. The up side to Red's approach is that you can essentially customize your camera, and to upgrade from a Scarlet to an Epic you can swap out the brain, then plug in the rest of your components, like the lens mount, display, recorder, audio module, etc. The Black Magic design follows the Mac Mini and iMac approach, which throws modularity out the window in favor of integration. It saves manufacturing cost. My guess is that it was one of the decisions that BMD made in order to hit their target price points for these cameras, which by any rational standard are ridiculously inexpensive.
and if RED can do it, what says BMD cant...
Price. Designing their cameras around a modular architecture, that is one that can be easily replaced component by component, increases the cost of manufacturing it.
Apple's product line shows some good examples of this; compare the price of the Mac Mini and the price of the iMac to the price of a comparably equipped system, including the monitor. Most of the non-Apple computers are assembled in a factory, and you can do things like swap the graphics card. The iMac's graphics card is built into the motherboard, along with the memory and everything else, even the monitor.
THAT is why it has higher value/cost than most machines. You're getting the same stuff, made by the same manufacturers like nVidia and ATI, but you can't just pop a card out of a slot and replace it.
So we get a tightly integrated box, and to upgrade it we have to sell/trade it in and shell out bux for a new one.
Look at Red's prices. It's $9K just to get their cheapest BRAIN, i.e. the box with the sensor in it, that has lots of pugs that other stuff can talk through.
I'm ok with that tradeoff, hence I'm not canceling my BMCC preorder, and I put a deposit on a Pocket cinema camera also. I can wait for 4K, but the Pocket camera is just what the doctor ordered for some of the documentary work I have planned.