Blackmagic Design, which has been a leader in “new thinking” about design for what formerly would have been “film” cameras for shooting “indies”…and are all about innovative design for Digital formats, sensors, and storage…. has finally released one of its new cameras for about $3K. (shoots 4K video and other formats)

Cameras by Blackmagic are designed to meet the needs of relatively low-budget productions but with all the features desired for that sort of moving pictures shoot. They are trying to replace the DSLR cameras such as Canon EOS 7D that have been used for this niche, and which are based on an old SLR “model” that was intended to replace film for photographers such as AP sports and news.

The actual camera in the pix above is rather a small part… as shown below with a much smaller lens on it. Above, the lens is relatively huge, and the other parts provide audio access and maybe alternative hard drive storage and batteries…with a barn door on the front to protect the lens from stray light, and to help form the particular rectangular image we use for digital and film presentations. (HD for example.)

Why such a huge lens?

Well, it’s complicated, but the more light captured, the more control the DP has over the image. The above lens probably also is a zoom lens, while below here is probably a fixed focal length.  Also, a huge lens has some macho appeal, let’s face it. So, one buys lenses in addition to the camera, to fit various production needs. The actual cost then, is the camera itself, any lenses needed, and various peripherals. Which do add up. The camera can be bought for less without any lenses.

Essentially when digital sensor chips and portable hard drives came along, Canon and Nikon took the old film camera Single Lens Reflex (SLR), and tried to pretend it was still a film camera so that set-in-their-ways pro photographers wouldn’t freak. Then, because it could shoot video, had high quality images, and was relatively very inexpensive, the EOS 7D,  and similar 5D and comparable Nikon models were adopted by the Sundance and NYU film school filmmaker crowd.

Instead, Blackmagic is doing a complete redesign from ground up to meet needs of formerly film cameras for motion pictures, but using all Digital elements. Yes, filmmakers doing big top budget Hollywood productions can still spend 10x as much on cameras, or more….but they are increasingly getting much less additional capability for their $$.

As evidenced by this “just now” released camera. Kind of the beginning of a “golden age” of quality and inexpensive digital moving pictures.

IOW, support for the DIY DLE revolution is now much more readily accessible, and it’s only going to get better and better…because dramatic improvements are tied to the continued creation of next generations of chips, which generally increase in capability without increase in cost. Same generally for software.

Pared with post shoot digital image processing software, the quality of final images of Blackmagic  cameras are very good.