Japanese camera maker Nikon announced that it has acquired US-based RED, one of the first major digital cinema camera brands in the world, making the latter a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Nikon Corporation.
RED emerged in 2005 as a solution to a dilemma faced by television and movie cameras: Digital production workflows were gaining popularity, but the existing digital video cameras failed to meet the quality standards for high-end television and low-end movie production.
RED aimed to create a 4K digital cinema camera that was both affordable and innovative — a significant advancement over the dominant 2K standard at the time, according to TechCrunch.
The company aimed to create a sensor that could rival the high quality of DSLR cameras (especially in low light) without sacrificing frame rate. This sensor had a similar physical size to analog film, closing the gap between digital and traditional film production.
The camera began to ship in large numbers in August of 2007, and soon RED became the leading camera brand for television and movie production.
It was the first practical digital video camera that shot in raw video formats (allowing more flexibility for the editing process), and it used compression algorithms that made the huge amount of data produced by the camera manageable.
The company’s cameras became a standard in the film industry. By 2016, more than 25% of the top 100 grossing films in the U.S. that were filmed on digital video used the company’s cameras.
Some of the well-known movies shot using RED cameras were Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, District 9, and so much more.
