The Wonder Of Ten Thousand Dollars

I don't usually talk about video hardware on this site because, well, look at the name. But the release of Canon's C300 and then, almost immediately afterward, down the street, RED launching the long-anticipated Scarlet, has made me interested. The C300 is a bit over my magic $10k barrier, but I wouldn't expect it to be there for long, what with Scarlet being all like "I don't give a damn." Or maybe that was Rhett, but it doesn't matter. Rhett didn't know shit about photography.

The amount of photographic and video hardware to make your eyes melt has been increasing as the prices have been going down. Undoubtedly because as the prices go down, the market size increases. In this venerable bracket we now have the Pentax 645d, a RED, a Canon, the Nikon D3X successor, and under that we have the new Canon 1D-X, the Panasonic AF-100, and lord knows what wonders Sony is going to release in the coming months. Being a high-end enthusiast has become incredibly exciting in a very short time.

I suppose that we have the Canon 5D to thank for this. Without it, the explosion of interest for video in the lower price brackets would have taken much longer to develop. And as the RED/Canon meeting has shown, the high-end will come down, and the low-end will go up, and where ever they meet, cool shit will undoubtedly result. That meeting place appears to be at around $10,000.

When the Pentax 645d came out, I was sure that I would own one within a year or two. With these developments, my money might very well end up somewhere else. Best Picture, here I come!