A Red Reality Check

After breathlessly reporting  on the game changing nature of the new Red One 4k digital camera, it only seems fair to report some caveats.  A bunch of rebuttals have been collected on the Red Facts page .
The key points are:

• Red has fudged the resolution numbers.  The tech specs have been polished up by marketing so that an apparent apples to apples comparison with other cameras is misleading.
  
• Extreme compression and interpolation produce noticable blocking and pixillation at full-screen projection.  35mm and high-end HD do not.
  
• There is some resentment in the cinematographer community that Red is using the mainstream tech press to hype the product. 

I've worked in the industry and can attest the cinematographers are a finicky guild.  They don't like being talked down to and they really don't like being told what to use by a director that's fallen for some company's hype.

Fanboys are livid.  Accusations (probably true) that many of the Red Facts facts come from Panavision and/or Sony.  A classic flamewar is developing.  But who cares?

So Red may not be the revolution.  But if not, then someone else soon.  Canon and Nikon are very busy in this realm.  Red may yet have some tricks up its sleeve.

The only other interesting facet of this issue is the continuing marketization of previously non-tech industries.  Marketization is what happens when tech industry marketing and product standards infect non-tech industries. It is a cancerous sub-set of traditional marketing.  Beta products, fudged specs, bleeding edge features adopted across the board, personalization of competition, no guarantees, six month product cycles, complete disregard for customers of previous product cycles, engineered lack of interoperability, expectation of continuing customer upgrades at a pace dictated by the vendor, DRM, Windows Vista.  Its the selling of broken or crippled products as a matter of course.  Everything becomes disposable.  Anything you can't fix with a patch, you throw away.  Microsoft is the best example of this disease, but they didn't invent it and are no more responsible for it perpetuation that HP, IBM or Apple among many others.  Add Red to the list.