NAB 2012: Atomos Ninja 2 – a hard to beat disk recorder

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What gear was used to record this video? Take a guess in the comments, we’ll reveal later.

The reason we like Atomos harddisk recorders is that they are affordable and easy to use. We’ve seen the Ninja at IBC 2011 and reviewed its counterpart the Samurai (link to review) that sports SDI connectivity.

At NAB 2012 ceo Jermoy Young presented their Ninja 2 device, a hardware upgraded version of the existing Ninja model that adds hdmi out and an improved screen. The old Ninja’s screen didn’t perform very well outdoors because it wasn’t very bright and lacked resolution (480×270). The new Ninja 2 has a 800×480 display with improved brightness and a viewing angle of 170°.

It should start shipping shortly and costs $995 like its predecessor:

Nikon Rumors says uncompressed HDMI out on Nikon D4

If you’ve been involved with HDSLR a bit then you know that Nikon hasn’t had a very big piece of the cake. Mainly due to bad compression formats their cameras weren’t used for video that much. With Canon, Sony and Panasonic taking most of the opportunity lately everybody’s wondering if Nikon has any products that can hold up against the competition.

Well the yet unannounced Nikon D4 could be hitting the nail on the head. Nikon Rumors posted an article saying that the D4 would have “Uncompressed video out through the HDMI port“.

Uncompressed HDMI out would be amazing because in conjunction with a harddisk recorder such as the Ninja it could turn the DSLR into a powerful high quality video camera.

Is it true? We’ll see when the camera is announced. According to Nikon Rumors the “(…) rating on those specs is 90% which means this is the real deal with maybe some small details being wrong possibly due to wrong translation.”

via nikonrumors, via canonrumors, thanks Paul

No clean hdmi out on the Sony A77

There’s a rumor that the Sony A77 offers clean hdmi out. It would be nice because this camera has some important advantages over other hdslrs like no moire, higher framerates and a nice screen. Only the bad compression Sony uses is what really bugs us all, so we would like to record via hdmi to a disk recorder.

Unfortunately in the 30 minutes I spent with the Sony rep on the camera menu we couldn’t get rid of the tiny square in the middle of the picture. Maybe there’s a workaround I didn’t find, but taking into consideration that crippling the hdmi outs on these cameras has become a standard procedure I suppose the facts are quite obvious.

We had even worse issues with the new Sony NEX-5N. The camera menu is constantly displayed on the right hand side of the feed. It seems like a camera has to be as “shitty” as the Sony HX9v in order to be allowed with clean hdmi out. Find an hdmi grab of this camera I recently posted here.

Only the new and yet unreleased Sony VG-20 offers a clean hdmi output. I will post a detailed report and test results in the next days.

IBC 2011: Sony HX9V on ATOMOS Ninja – IBC floor walkthrough

IBC has ended today at 4pm and we’re at the airport right now, waiting for boarding.
We met with lots of cool people and enjoyed gadget-land, but now we’re happy to go home and get some sleep.

To give you a better sense of the floor and to follow up the announcements about the Atomos Samurai and Connect I reported about yesterday, I decided to post this grab from the Sony HX9V hdmi out.

Remember our in depth video review of this fun little point and shoot camera? Well we missed to tell you that it is one of the very few cameras that has a clean hdmi output.

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