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You Didn’t Know You Needed a 6K Camera Until Blackmagic Design Debuted One

Blackmagic Design today announced the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, a new handheld digital film camera with a full Super 35 size 6K HDR image sensor, 13 stops of dynamic range, an EF lens mount and dual native ISO up to 25,600 for incredible low light performance.

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K is available immediately from Blackmagic Design resellers worldwide for $2,495 USD.

The design of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera packs an incredible number of high end digital film features into a miniaturized, handheld design. Made from lightweight carbon fiber polycarbonate composite, the camera features a multifunction handgrip with all controls for recording, ISO, white balance and shutter angle. Because it’s an advanced digital film camera, the sensor is designed to reduce thermal noise allowing cleaner shadows and higher ISO.

Featuring a larger 6144×3456 Super 35 sensor and EF lens mount, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K lets customers use larger EF photographic lenses to create cinematic images with shallower depth of field, allowing creative defocussed backgrounds and gorgeous bokeh effects. This means that customers can shoot in 6K and then in post production zoom and re-frame to allow wide shots and close ups to be created, all from a single camera and without losing image quality.

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K and 6K both have 13 stops of dynamic range, which means they preserve more detail in the lightest and darkest areas of an image than simple video cameras can. This allows customers to set exposure for an indoor scene such as a cafe and still retain the details of bright outdoor light coming through a window. Customers even get more colors than the standard DCI-P3 colorspace used for feature films.

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera features dual gain ISO up to 25,600, which means both the 4K and 6K models are optimized to minimize grain or noise in images, while maintaining the full dynamic range of the sensor. The native ISO of 400 is ideal for scenes with on-set lighting. The gain is set automatically as they adjust the ISO setting on the camera, so it’s easy to capture great images when they don’t have time to set up lights.

The new 6K model will shoot up to 50 fps at 6144×3456 16:9 or 60 fps at 6144×2560 2.4:1 and 60 fps at 5744×3024 17:9. For higher frame rates they can window the sensor and shoot up to 120 fps at 2.8K 2868×1512 17:9. Customers can even work in true anamorphic 6:5 using anamorphic lenses in 3.7K 60 fps at 3728×3104.

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Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera records using standard open file formats so customers don’t have to waste time transcoding media. Recording works in industry standard 10-bit Apple ProRes files in all formats up to 4K or 12-bit Blackmagic RAW in all formats up to 6K. Best of all media files work on all operating systems plus customers can format media cards and disks in HFS+ for Mac and ExFAT for Windows.

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera features built in CFast and SD UHS-II card recorders as well as a USB-C expansion port for recording direct to an external media disk. Customers can use regular SD cards for HD or higher performance UHS-II and CFast cards for native 4K or 6K when using Blackmagic RAW. Imagine capturing over an hour of full resolution 6K images on a single 256GB SD UHS-II card.

Blackmagic RAW is a new format designed to capture and preserve the quality of the sensor data from the camera. Video formats such as H.264 are highly compressed, plus add noise and weird artifacts, causing original sensor detail to be lost forever. Blackmagic says that Blackmagic RAW eliminates this problem and gives users stunning images with incredible detail and color throughout the production pipeline from camera to edit, color and mastering. It also saves camera settings as metadata so customers can set ISO, white balance and exposure in camera or override them later while editing, all without any loss of quality. Blackmagic RAW files are also small and fast to use making them easy to work with.

The rear of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera features a 5-inch touchscreen.

The camera includes a full size HDMI connector for monitoring with support for HDR and 10-bit output. There’s also a mini XLR connection with 48 volt phantom power for attaching professional microphones, a 3.5-mm video camera style microphone input, headphone connection and a professional locking DC power connector.

All the specs are here.

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