When it comes to cinema, optical fundamentals are the most important for getting high production value from an indie budget. That means lenses of course, but this is a camera we're talking about, which means sensor size has a huge impact. Compare the size of this camera's sensor (About micro-4/3s) to APS-C and Full frame 35mm. It is about 1/4th the size of a full frame sensor.
A larger sensor allows for better low light images with less noise. It also allows for significantly more control over depth of field (and it is this control that distinguishes "cinema" from "video" in people's minds to a great degree.)
You can buy HD (2k) shooting cameras with full frames from Canon for about this price. You can buy APS-C 2k cameras from Sony for 1/3 the price (leaving more money for nice lenses). The NEX-7 seems to be a pretty ideal choice, in fact.
Sure, these cameras don't shoot RAW, but then, you don't really need RAW. RED made RAW popular with their no compromises approach and that's very nice, if you have the money, but notice that RED didn't compromise on their sensors, and actually has (or is promising, you never know with RED) very large sensors. 24mbps HD is more than sufficient for indie filmmakers in most cases. Granted, I think a 48mbps compressed stream would be about ideal. I wish Sony and Canon would make that an option.
I think in this camera, so much went into the ability to record in RAW that to make their price point they had to compromise on the sensor, and that's the wrong compromise. You pull raw off of the sensor in every camera, but carrying it all the way to the storage medium forces you to spend a lot of money on each stage, including shipping the camera with an SSD, and naturally, Thunderbolt then makes sense, but it too adds to the price.
At sundance I've seen movies shot on DV (an SD format) that worked as movies. We've all seen HD movies in the cinemas- for instance Revenge of The Sith was delivered as a 1920x817 frame- HD cut down to make a wider aspect ratio.[1]
And of course when you're working with RAW it affects the rest of your production pipeline- you need more storage space to keep your footage, backups get bigger, you need more bandwidth to your storage and you need a heavier CPU to work with it, etc. The final deliverable isn't going to be RAW, its likely to be HD (at least in many cases) and so I'd rather spend that budget on optical quality, and in a camera that means sensor.
I do hope these guys find great success, as the japanese really could use some good competition.
Edit to add: I wrote the above response based on the EOSHD article, but checking the BlackMagic website, I better understand why they made the choices they did. I still think that if they'd gone with an APS-C sensor, or full frame, this would be much more exciting. But now I'd weight their choice of improved capture via raw as about equal to the impact of sensor size in image quality.
I would have loved it if they used a larger sensor. However not like canon dslr but more like sony FS100. Canon 5d2/3 have a problem reducing all these pixels down to HD. And it's not the sensor size but pixel pitch that impacts S/N ratio. At 2.5K I think this camera has a better pixel density than the canon5d2/3.
The biggest issue is DOF. Which will require fast lenses at shorter focal length that don't readily exist yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sensor_sizes_overlaid_ins...
A larger sensor allows for better low light images with less noise. It also allows for significantly more control over depth of field (and it is this control that distinguishes "cinema" from "video" in people's minds to a great degree.)
You can buy HD (2k) shooting cameras with full frames from Canon for about this price. You can buy APS-C 2k cameras from Sony for 1/3 the price (leaving more money for nice lenses). The NEX-7 seems to be a pretty ideal choice, in fact.
Sure, these cameras don't shoot RAW, but then, you don't really need RAW. RED made RAW popular with their no compromises approach and that's very nice, if you have the money, but notice that RED didn't compromise on their sensors, and actually has (or is promising, you never know with RED) very large sensors. 24mbps HD is more than sufficient for indie filmmakers in most cases. Granted, I think a 48mbps compressed stream would be about ideal. I wish Sony and Canon would make that an option.
I think in this camera, so much went into the ability to record in RAW that to make their price point they had to compromise on the sensor, and that's the wrong compromise. You pull raw off of the sensor in every camera, but carrying it all the way to the storage medium forces you to spend a lot of money on each stage, including shipping the camera with an SSD, and naturally, Thunderbolt then makes sense, but it too adds to the price.
At sundance I've seen movies shot on DV (an SD format) that worked as movies. We've all seen HD movies in the cinemas- for instance Revenge of The Sith was delivered as a 1920x817 frame- HD cut down to make a wider aspect ratio.[1]
And of course when you're working with RAW it affects the rest of your production pipeline- you need more storage space to keep your footage, backups get bigger, you need more bandwidth to your storage and you need a heavier CPU to work with it, etc. The final deliverable isn't going to be RAW, its likely to be HD (at least in many cases) and so I'd rather spend that budget on optical quality, and in a camera that means sensor.
I do hope these guys find great success, as the japanese really could use some good competition.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CineAlta
-----------------
Edit to add: I wrote the above response based on the EOSHD article, but checking the BlackMagic website, I better understand why they made the choices they did. I still think that if they'd gone with an APS-C sensor, or full frame, this would be much more exciting. But now I'd weight their choice of improved capture via raw as about equal to the impact of sensor size in image quality.