On the REDuser.net forums RED CEO and owner Jim Jannard has announced that the long awaited RED Epic camera is ready for production. Seems like the wishful thinking for a 2010 release date paid off. The Epic camera is the more modular and powerful big brother to the RED One and promises to gain back ground for RED in the digital cinema market that was lost to Arri with its Alexa camera.

In a statement on the forum website Jannard stated that Epic “was officially declared ready for production today.” Though that sounds promising, Jannard cautioned that there is still a long process to get the camera into consumer hands but that the “end is in sight.”

That long process involves getting parts and manufacturing on board to meet the demand of RED’s follow up camera. If the hype matches what others have been saying about the camera then RED should be in for a big payday.

Epic’s main draw is a 5K resolution on the company’s Mysterium-X sensor coupled with the HDRx feature that Jannard showed off not so long ago. The camera was also designed with much more thought about the modular nature of the camera making it so that parts are easily swappable.

Here’s Jim Jannard’s statement in full:

EPIC was officially declared ready for production today. We have prototypes that pass all the requirements we set out the past few months. That means we will finish the Tattoo program and put Tattoos on special jobs and begin ordering all the parts and pieces (over 18,000) to begin production. It will take a bit of time to set up the line and gather all we need, but the end is in sight.

Just to be clear, not every feature is currently enabled, but the most important ones are and the build seems very stable as a foundation. We expect 95% of the features to be ready by the time production EPICs are released.

This is a pretty big day.

Jim

Jim Jannard has previously said that the company would not focus on its Scarlet camera until after the release of Epic. It seems now that RED can begin to shift its R&D focus into that camera.

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About the author: Evan Luzi is the editor and founder of The Black and Blue as well as a freelance camera assistant.

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