New EF Mount Video Camera in October? [CR1]

[catz]

Canon could make a Red Epic competitor, but is that where the market is?

That would be the market if Canon would make Red Epic competitor at price level in the realm of indie film makers, wedding photographers etc. Red Epic is über highend and Red can handle that niche for sure. However, that niche would no longer be niche if it was affordable enough.

The price of the camera (e.g. 3000, 6000, 12000, 27000) has nothing to do with the ability to do 4K or 444. The price is exactly what the product management decides, and the manufacturing cost may be a tiny fraction of it. The smaller the production cost vs. sale cost, the higher the margins. We can clearly see that the margins on e.g. 15000 dollar camcorder are huge - not more expensive to manufacture than a DSLR but price many times higher. Given enough CPU/GPU horsepower, the camera could do wonders with very little manufacturing cost.

Hint: Consumer grade graphics cards from nVidia and AMD exceed the horse power needed to make perfect 1080p or even 4K video out of e.g. 24 mpix source material. These cost 100-300 dollars per unit (for the whole card). If you have a integrated chip solution in a camera and volumes would be high, the manufacturing cost would be a fraction from the price of a camera sale price.

There you have it, there is no Steve Jobs of camcorders at the moment, but if such person would appear, he or she would do the following: Utilize latest GPU technology to have enough processing capability to make the video aliasing free and perfect 1080p, 2K and 4K without optical antialiasing filter. Use existing technology from DSLRs and put it all together. And you have a RED killer with price point of mere iMac and you could sell millions. Or if you want it to be niche, of course you could price it 100000 and sell 5 units. Or you could be like Sony, you would make a professional version and then cheap version out of it, you would make some artificial degradation of the quality or lack of basic important function to the consumer version to make it "consumer" (consumer is to be fooled, they are sheeps right?). Some competitors of Apple were in that kind of business until Apple almost killed them by introducing products which run circles around them despite anyone else could have done those too, technology would have been all there, but they chose not to do it because it was "too nice" "too new" "too unconventional" "nobody has that kind of things". Yea right, until someone wiser has, dinosaurs die to starvation.

I could do that, but it would be require upfront cost that I could not have unless someone very rich would be funding, because what would be easy for Canon with established production, would be somewhat costly and hard but not impossible to come up with by a small startup company. RED is an example of that and I am happy they have succeeded. And I am laughing when I see how RED products run circles about anything else on that market, they are smarter than their competitors on their market despite they don't have the advantage of huge production, logistics, sale etc. organizations of e.g. Canon or Sony. Unlike RED, most startups would have failed in that attempt, and that's the reason why RED is targeting to high end niche and not to consumer. They don't need to sell so many to get their salaries paid, at that price point. Doing that for consumers, would mean much larger up front investments and it would need someone really believing that it will pay off and thinking in unconventional way before nothing would have been produced.