I just read with interest Carl Mrozek’s article on the Red Ray DVD player unveiled at the ‘Red’ event in Las Vegas (Playback, June 22). This article is similar, it seems, to everything else being written about the Red system these days, in its total absence of critical objectivity with regard to the company or its products.

It seems the media has swallowed the first-rate hype Red has created, hook, line and sinker. (An excellent example would be last year’s Wired article which stated, almost literally, that the Red was the be-all and end-all of moviemaking and that film cameras are not even manufactured anymore – which is absurd and false. Whatever happened to fact-checking?)

A good example in your article would be the reference to the Red Pro Primes: ‘The consensus would be that the Red Primes matched or beat their competition in all cases.’ This is absurd. Consensus by whom? Which competition? Any cinematographer worth his salt can tell you they simply do not stand up next to the best that Cooke or Zeiss, for instance, have to offer when properly assessed on a lens projector.

It’s the kind of statement, like all the other unedited, naive, incomplete hyperbole being printed about the Red system, that resulted in many production executives mandating the Red on numerous pilots this spring – executives who are now regretting that decision due to the many inexplicable glitches on set and the numerous bugs still to be worked out in the post-production workflow that no one knew about or bothered to mention.

Please understand, while I will tell you film is still the best way to record moving images, that I am no film-loving Luddite. When they announced this camera, I dropped what I was doing and went to check it out, because in 30 years as a cinematographer, I have been very quick to assess any new technology that comes our way. In fact, I have just finished a large-budget TV movie using the Red camera. It was a choice made at the network level. (And, yes, one that they are regretting. I won’t go into details here.)

My point is to ask for a little more objectivity on the part of the press, because unbridled and uninformed enthusiasm surrounding any new technology serves no one.

Recently, to help settle the quality debate, a test was conducted by the ASC together with the Producers Guild of America. It did side-by-side tests of all major digital formats along with film. While I haven’t had a chance to see it, by most early accounts, even though the film was ‘dumbed-down’ to 2K resolution, it still looked best. After that, the Arri D21 and Sony F35 were the most impressive, with Red coming in a tie for last. Kind of like where 16mm used to fall when we tested new film stocks. The Arri D21 and Sony F35 are very expensive cameras. The Red, like 16mm once was – though not necessarily bad – is the cheap option. I guess you still get what you pay for. Everyone needs to remember that.

Robert McLachlan ASC/CSC