The big news this year is AJA is now making a camera.  It represents almost 5 years of development and won NAB Best in Show.  The reason why AJA brought a camera to market is it builds upon a lot of the existing technologies they have developed over the years.  Obviously with the IO HD and Ki Pro,  AJA has developed the market for external encoding so the camera builds on a lot of that encoding technology and what AJA has tried to do is bring back a camera to market that draws on the last 100 years of camera development.

That is, they are bringing ergonomics back.  It’s a camera you can take out and put on your shoulder.  Those ergonomics have been balanced out with a magnesium case and in that respect it’s just 6 pounds in weight and easy to get it up onto your shoulder.  

All the internal encoding is going to be ProRes but significantly its every single flavour of ProRes.  So 444, 422 at every level.  It’s 4K recording.  If you want to do 4K at 30p that’s 444.  If you want to do 4K at 60p that’s going to be 422.  Now currently that’s not the encoder.. That’s a limitation of the bandwidth of SSD.

As far as other options for higher frame rates AJA is doing this via thunderbolt and SDIs.  Thunderbolt will allow 4K 30fps on export as AJA RAW.  The 4 x 3G SDIs will give you up to 120fps of 4K as AJA RAW.

In addition, there has been a lot which has gone into the design.  The aesthetic of the design is everything, the functional and practical elements of it being key.  It looks beautiful but it behaves beautifully as well.  In terms of operation its perfectly set for three people to operate this without getting in anybody's way which is really important.

It’s PL mount only but it’s a mechanical mount with 4 screw point so it’s completely removable and it offers back focus adjustment as well with the sensor.  So this means if a 3rd party wants to make an EF mount they are good to go. 

Behind the mount is a combined IR cut and OLPF.  So the Infra red cut means we get vibrant, strong colours and the optical low pass filter means we get reduction in wire a patterning – so a really crisp clean image. 

It will be shipping by September at a price of $12,078 inc GST.