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RED Hydrogen One Review of Reviews: A Spectacular Failure
RED is most well-known for making very high-end camera equipment. The Hydrogen One was announced over a year ago and was supposed to launch this past summer. It was delayed several times, but it will soon be available for the lofty price of $1,300. That's why the review embargo lifted this morning with almost unanimous negativity.
Red Hydrogen One Review: Red, dead, no redemption
The Hydrogen One is defined by its ambition. It's meant to revolutionize not just phones, but all of media with a "holographic" display and a camera system capable of recording into this 3D format. The phone is also expandable, and RED — one of the most esteemed names in digital imaging — plans to release an add-on camera sensor that's capable of transforming the phone into a full-on cinema camera.
It's an exciting prospect, but it all comes crashing down because of one immense flaw: the holographic display just isn't very good. It's a novelty. And while you can occasionally see glimmers of the potential that RED might have seen in this tech, it's certainly not present in this generation of the phone, and it's hard to imagine that potential being realized any time soon.
- The Red Hydrogen One Fails to Ignite Reviewer Passions
- RED Hydrogen One review: Buy now, enjoy later? Red's Hydrogen One lacks its most anticipated feature
- Review: RED Hydrogen One holographic phone has potential, but it's far from ready
- RED Hydrogen One review: A defining gimmick can't save this overpriced experiment
- RED Hydrogen One review: It's really cool
Previously: RED Pitches a $1,200 Holographic Android Smartphone
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday November 01 2018, @02:09PM (2 children)
As photography is a major hobby of mine I am well aware of the points in your link, and the pointlessness of super-high resolutions if you are just posting pics to the the web. Nevertheless the phrase "high end cameras" was used in this thread, and, with respect, no-one would attach that description to a 8 megapixel DSLR camera any more, though they might have done 15 years ago, I bought a 10 megapixel DSLR camera back then when it was the flagship of its brand, but no one camera model stays "high end" for very long these days, such is the technical progress.
A high end general-purpose camera today would mean having a full-frame (36x24mm) sensor, or be one of the very top end APS-C (24x16mm) sensor cameras, or be a medium format (sensor anything over 36x24mm and ideally approaching the old 645 film format of 56x42mm). The resolution would be at least 24 megapixels, although even that is being left behind with 50 megapixels looking like the new benchmark soon. Examples of cameras in this category are the Nikon D850, Pentax K1, Canon EOS 5DS, Sony Alpha A9, Phase One XF IQ4 (medium format example), and Pentax KP (high-end APS-C example).
But as you say, megapixels are not everything - necessary but not sufficient to make "high-end".
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday November 01 2018, @08:35PM
No one said that 8MP was high end, although if you use the term as it is generally, to refer to a product's price and market position, what would you call an 8MP camera that originally cost thousands of dollars? (Cadillac is considered a high end brand, even though there was a time when they sold rebadged Chevy Cavaliers.)
As with many things, cameras are becoming gimmicky these days with their touch screens, GPS, social media features, etc. And when that happens I have to ask myself how much advancement there really is in the core capabilities.
Have you ever seen the image quality rankings on dxomark? I believe that the number of pixels does not figure into the score, and as a smaller pixel collects less light there is something of a trade-off between resolution and sensitivity when a sensor is designed. With that being the case, some older cameras compare quite favorably. I suspect there is a margin of error of a few points, since some cameras which used the same sensor had slightly different scores. But on the Canon rankings, the 20MP EOS 6D (which wasn't even super expensive) still sits a mere 6 places from the top. The older (and much more expensive) 1Ds mk3 is close behind. The highest-ranked point-and-shoot model is tied with the original 5D. As a nerd I find this stuff fascinating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 01 2018, @10:41PM
It's not a RED imager but 4k is only 8.5 megapixels although at 24 frames per second. You're shutter speed is (usually) 1/48s in cinema, so you need serious lighting to get an indoor exposure at 800 ISO. The trend is towards more sensitive cameras with larger photosites. The Sony A7S II [techradar.com] is around 12 megapixels to reduce noise when operating at higher gain (ISO).