News out of the RED camp about a new modular Optical Low Pass Filter or OLPF for the RED Dragon. There will be two modules available to start with.
More from Jarred Land President at RED Digital Cinema:
Just thought I would give people a sneak peek on the Modular OLPF thats going to be available for Dragon soon.
There still people that prefer the old OLPF because even though skintones and highlight protection isn’t as good as the new OLPF, they want a noise free image at higher ISOs that the old OLPF gives you by letting in more light. We of course will put whichever OLPF you want in your camera now… but the new OLPF module will make things alot easier to change.
The freedom and flexibility to make that kind of decision in different environments should be beneficial to everyone.. even if they only make the choice once and never change it again.
The Module install is pretty straight forward… we can do it or you can do it. Getting the old stuff out is the hardest part. The new “module” goes in easy and 4 little bolts and you are done. You don’t need to touch any glass and you don’t need to worry about putting it upside down or right side left. The front of the module is marked so you can see which one it is by just looking at the sensor so rental customers can quickly see which one is in camera.
At any rate… we are testing prototypes now and I expect these to be ready in 6-8 weeks after we get out of tooling. The OLPF Modules will be for sale in the store so you can choose whichever one you want or all of them and change at will. If you want to keep whatever OLPF you have in your camera right now you can still send us your camera and we can transfer your OLPF into a new module and send it back to you.
There will be 2 modules available out of the gate obviously ( The new OLPF and the OLD OLPF ) and IR PASS, ND, Clear and a few specialty ones will come after.
To some people, super clean at high ASAs is more important than anything else. Those are the guys screaming right now about noise and prefer the old OLPF.
To some people that have the ability to light a scene they are going to prefer color accuracy and higher end protection over everything else. Those guys are the ones really happy right now with the new OLPF.
With this.. you get both. Just switch as you need.
Pic and news via REDuser.