Constant Cinema

These days everybody is gaga over HD video in DSLR stills cameras, or nuts over Red's existing camera and their forthcoming Epic and Scarlet cameras. Arri's Alexa has made some waves recently too. But the camera that I've been drooling about for over a year now is a simpler device and, I feel, a much more elegant solution. The Ikonoskop a-cam dII takes open standards and applies a film camera sensibility to a digital device. Maybe I'm being ridiculously purist - after all, the guys at Zacuto are showing that highly-compressed stills camera images hold up, and everything coming of Red's Mysterium X sensor is fantastic - but the idea of an uncompressed virgin image sequence just does it for me. I don't care what anyone says, digital is still a compromise from film - it's catching up fast but it's still a compromise. So it seems to me a further compromise to compress the image, and while that has traditionally been necessary, technology marches on and we now have the ability to demand better. 

The guys at FreshDV sat down with Ikonoskop at NAB to look at the prototype and I'm sold even deeper now. Seeing the dII with lens and mattebox got me excited, and I'm now getting over my earlier reservations about the unusual form factor. In fact I don't think it's all that unusual: designed to be steadied against the operator's head as it is it reminds me of shooting 8mm.

day5_ikonoskop