DSLR vs hollywood grade camera

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SuchJelly

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Hey i was wondering what the difference in dslr and say an alexa, red etc. the price varies greatly but i fail to see that much of a difference in image quality, that might just be me though.
 
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Solandri
If it's a digital movie camera, yes. (Unless they've moved to extremely high MP sensors which use Bayer filters. I haven't been keeping up with the technology at that end.)

Price is not proportional to the cost of manufacturing a product. It's proportional to (manufacturing cost) + (design cost) / (number of units sold). The R&D costs have to be recouped over all copies of the product sold.

Say it costs $10 million to design a camera sensor.

  • ■Tens or hundreds of millions of copies of a smartphone camera sensor will be sold. So (design cost) / (number of units sold) is close to or less than $1 per unit. And the price of a smartphone camera sensor is very close to the cost of manufacturing the sensor.
    ■A DSLR model might sell...
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Solandri

Solandri

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DSLRs (except the Foveon) and all consumer cameras, smartphone cameras, and webcams use what's called a Bayer filter. They don't actually record red, green, and blue at their full resolution. They record it at 1/4 resolution for red and blue, 1/2 resolution for green. Computer software then smears out the colors to kinda sorta match the monochrome picture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter

Broadcast grade cameras use a system of prisms to break up the incoming image into three identical images. These images fall onto three separate sensors, one for red, one for green, and one for blue. So each color is recorded at full broadcast resolution.

Camera sensors are getting high enough in resolution that this doesn't matter as much anymore. If you're shooting 1080p video with a 24MP camera (6000x4000), the color resolution is going to exceed a 1:1 pixel count at 1080p even with a Bayer filter. But broadcast people still like the certainty that the sensor is recording each color exactly where it was in the original scene, as opposed to an intermediate step where an algorithm is smearing the colors out.
 
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SuchJelly

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Does this also apply to movie productions? and why is this 10 or even 50 times the price of a dslr?
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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If it's a digital movie camera, yes. (Unless they've moved to extremely high MP sensors which use Bayer filters. I haven't been keeping up with the technology at that end.)

Price is not proportional to the cost of manufacturing a product. It's proportional to (manufacturing cost) + (design cost) / (number of units sold). The R&D costs have to be recouped over all copies of the product sold.

Say it costs $10 million to design a camera sensor.

  • ■Tens or hundreds of millions of copies of a smartphone camera sensor will be sold. So (design cost) / (number of units sold) is close to or less than $1 per unit. And the price of a smartphone camera sensor is very close to the cost of manufacturing the sensor.
    ■A DSLR model might sell 100,000 copies. (design cost) / (number of units sold) is then only about $100. It raises the price, but it's still less than or about the same as the manufacturing cost.
    ■A professional movie camera might sell only 1000 copies. (design cost) / (number of units sold) is then $10,000 per camera.
 
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