ARRI Developing it's 4K in ALEXA Series

ARRI is developing a 4K camera with 14 stops of dynamic range and high frame rate capabilities, and while that might not come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, now we’ve got confirmation straight from the company itself. Everyone is making a 4K camera, so it was only a matter of time that ARRI jumped on board as well. What’s interesting, however, is not that ARRI is developing a 4K camera, but that they aren’t happy with how quickly companies seem to want to push HD to the wayside and get on the UHD and 4K trains.

In a recent Hollywood Reporter post, ARRI’s Managing Director, Franz Kraus, revealed some of his thoughts about tactics employed by companies to make 4K look better.

“We don't want to produce one camera that has high contrast and another with high detail.”

 
The industry's inexorable push toward 4K by suggesting that HD content displayed on HD screens at equipment trade shows is not being shown at its optimum quality in order to compare unfavourably with 4K displays.

“What annoys me, more than being asked about whether we are launching a 4K camera, is that at trade shows, HD quality is often being dumbed down, or not presented to its optimum quality, in order to make Ultra HD 4K look good,” Kraus said. “This is a bad trick because consumers will buy 4K displays based on the false expectation that the image is really that superior to HD.”

He argued, “The perception of picture quality has a lot to do with the physical performance of the display. For example, a 2K image displayed on an HD OLED monitor looks incredible because the active light source shows far higher contrast ratios in the picture.”

Arri, maker of the popular Alexa digital cinema camera that has been used to shoot features from Skyfall to Life of Pi, has long questioned the value of 4K photography to cinematographers who it says view exposure latitude, highlight handling and natural skin tones as more important than just resolution. “Resolving fine detail is a quality attribute which we do not deny, but we want to develop a camera that continues to deliver high dynamic range as well as greater resolution,” Kraus said.