What happens in Vegas… stays on the Expressway blog! After 3 years away, we were lucky enough to attend NAB 2022 to talk shop with some of our favorite vendors and explore all of the newest film industry tech. Check out the camera gear that caught our attention, and stay tuned for some of the gear that will be available at Expressway!
Flanders 22” OLED Monitor
When the news that Flanders lost their 17” panel manufacturer was released, we were extremely curious as to what their next maneuver would be in the production monitor space. They released the DM241 (replacing the DM240), but no DM171. It can almost be left unsaid that FSI is one of the most highly regarded production / post production monitor manufacturers in the industry, so they HAD to be working on something new.
Enter the DM220 – their 22” 10-bit OLED monitor. With the uncertainty of finding a quality 17” panel manufacturer to fill their DM170/171 line, moving to the OLED world makes a lot of sense – especially since the Sony PVM-A170 line moved away from OLED with their PVM-X series.
The details we do currently know is that estimated retail is $6500, is part of their DM series of monitors, will be 1920×1080, will include a “Zero-Delay” mode, the I/O and build are very similar to the existing products in the line, and no ETA on delivery. Although everything seems to be moving toward 4K “HDR” panels, demand for the PVM-A170 is still fairly high, so it will be interesting to see where the DM220 will lie within the landscape of production monitoring.
SmallHD Cine18
4K on-set monitoring is now upon us. Most of the industry monitor manufacturers are putting out 4K “HDR” product lines for their next series of products and SmallHD is no exception. It makes sense now that Teradek and SmallHD are under the Creative Solutions umbrella that they can steer the ship in that direction by providing the monitor as well as the wireless transmitting solution at the same time.
The Cine 18 is their newest release in their workhorse 4K HDR monitoring line and is the successor to their 1703 P3X models. The aluminum unibody design makes it extremely durable and is noticeably lighter than the previous-gen 1703 line. It is also noticeably brighter at 1100nits compared to the 900nits of the 1703. They have also released a dual battery hot-swap plate with power pass-through (so no more DTap to 4P XLR Cable needed) and implemented 4x 12G-SDI In/Out ports for quad split without the need for a separate splitter box.
Expressway will be adding Cine 18’s into our lineup along with Cine13’s and Bolt 4K systems in the very near future.
Cooke S8 Full Frame Primes
The Cooke S8’s are, in my opinion, the true successor to their venerable S4 line. They have managed to merge the T1.4 speed of the S5’s and the full-frame coverage of the S7’s, all the while keeping it contained in a housing that’s very similar in size to the S4’s. (Actually slightly smaller at 104mm front diameter compared to the 110mm of the S4’s.) They have also redesigned the electronics of the i/technology board to the rear for easier serviceability. The S8’s are color balanced for accurate matching between Cooke’s existing line of lenses and uses a 9 leaf iris design compared to the 8 leaf design of the S4’s. It can almost go unsaid that the S8’s will be extremely popular among those who want the acclaimed look that Cooke is known to provide along with the FOV that large format offers.
CoreSWX B-Mount to V-Mount / 3-Stud 28V/20A Hardmount Adapters
CoreSWX has spent the past few years aggressively working to make a name for themselves as a respected battery option in the cinema world. They released a hard mount B-Mount adapter that replaces a B-Mount plate on whichever distro box of your choosing to a 28V Gold-Mount plate. The 28V Gold-Mount plate has an additional two pins that allow their Helix Max batteries to give the camera (like the new Alexa Mini that’s releasing next month) 28V/20A power. The advantage this provides is that their Helix Max batteries can act as 14V batteries without worry of feeding too much power since those plates do not have the extra two pins to activate the 28V output. Instead of the dedicated B-Mount batteries for your camera package and standard 14V V/Gold-Mount batteries for your monitors and accessories, the Helix Max batteries can play on either. Assuming your B-Mount plate on your camera is adapted to the 28V configuration.
Orion 21mm T2 2x Anamorphic
Atlas Lens Co. has done an impressive job entering into the cinema optics world as an accessible, quality anamorphic lens manufacturer. The Orion series has seen a huge amount of popularity in what once was a shooting format that was either very expensive or dealt with a lot of headaches in regards to camera builds / compatibility (see: Square Front Lomo Anamorphics / pre-Evolution series Kowa Anamorphics). They managed to put out quality lenses with an image that both had character and resolved well. The newly released 21mm Orion is, from what I’m aware of, the widest 2x anamorphic in existence. Although it does have very noticeable barrel distortion, it offers a previously unobtainable FOV of 124 degrees. Although you might not be shooting vista’s or architectural projects with it any time soon, it is a really fun lens and focal length for the anamorphic format and adds that one extra tool in a creative’s arsenal to now get shots that wasn’t really possible before.
Canon CN-E LF Zooms
Canon released their large format line of CN-E Zooms this year with focal ranges for the two zooms at 20-50mm T2.4 and 45-135mm T2.4. The ranges make a lot of sense for large format and this CN-E LF line builds upon their existing lineup of CN-E Primes and their S35 counterparts, the 15.5-47mm and 30-105mm zooms. Designed to resolve up to 8K from center to the periphery and implementing Cooke’s i/ technology for capturing metadata (in addition to the EF data transmission), Canon is now learning some of the lessons from its previous cinema line of products – most notably from a usability standpoint are the interchangeable mounts (EF/PL). Previously, these lenses would need modification to allow for user-changeable mounts, but Canon has now developed this feature directly out of the factory.
Interested in reading more about NAB? Check out our blog featuring the lighting gear NAB 2022!
Written By: Auggy Kim – Camera Department Director
Whenever he’s not taking care of our camera gear at Expressway, he’s playing an unhealthy amount of video games, eating Cronuts, and looking out of windows existentially.