Red OneIf you don’t regularly check out reduser.net, where the faithful come to share their breathless anticipation of the forthcoming Red One camera system, you might have missed Monday’s late announcement of pricing for the Red camera kit. No big surprises in the line-up — $1250 or $2750 for a “RED RAIL” system, $1650 for a battery kit, $2950 for a viewfinder and $1700 for an LCD — although it does, of course, jack up the price of a working Red camera significantly from the oft-quoted $17,500 base price. Mike Curtis at HDForIndies.com has an interesting analysis of all this. (He professes to be surprised, but only a little, by exactly how expensive the system turns out to be.)

Assuming Red doesn’t have trouble delivering cameras as promised, I have no doubt its presence in the market this year will put price pressure on the more established (and much more expensive) camera vendors — but no matter how good Red turns out to be, many users will still appreciate the kind of support infrastructure that huge, well-established camera manufacturers offer them. Once the first Red filmmakers start hashing out their production and post workflows, we’ll start to have a clearer picture of how big a competitive threat Red poses to The Man.