robert Hart wrote: I wonder if they might be persuaded to assemble and sell them as "experimental" with no warranty of satisfactory performance either express or implied, hopefully compatable enough with the original URSA guts to "plug and play" at say 25P and ISO 400 which is all I need. I simply want to get my greasy hands on one.
I don’t really think you do.
I’ve shot with many such sensors on many cameras during early testing of cameras and they’re unusable in that state. Many many faults. Like bad. Really bad. You can’t get anything useable out of them. Dead pixels, terrible noise, terrible random glitches. Big lines through your picture. No one wants that.
That’s the thing. Getting to that stage is relatively easy. Getting all those faults out is where it gets really really hard from an R&D point of view, taking a large investment of time and effort and resources.
Let’s imagine that they would sell maybe 2000 turrets in a successful scenario. And I’d say that’s an optimistic number.
That’s a piddling amount of return for the energy and cost already invested, let alone what it costs to get it made customer ready.
Any as far as I’ve seen, BMD make most of the cameras in house “just in time”. They don’t build 500 units and park them on a shelf.
I think BMD have done the right thing by their customers by offering a low costs upgrade to what is arguable a much better camera in most of the ways that count.
If you want ultra high frame rates, and the larger form factor screens model, then you’re the ones that haven’t had your expectations, but I suspect those Ursa customers are small subset of the already small numbers of people that own Ursas. I bet the majority of that small subset are the ones here keeping this discussion going.
JB