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I'm not sure the Alexa and F35 were panicked responses to the Red... the Arri D20 and Panavision Genesis predated the Red, and are very clearly the ancestors of the Alexa and F35 respectively - they use the same resolutions, sensor layouts and colourspaces, if not the exact same chips and recording formats. Not to mention the Dalsa Origin, a 4k camera out well before the Reds.

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It was a pretty incredible shift though - The more common cameras of the day, such as the 1080p Sony F950, was going for over $180,000 a package, and suddenly you could get a 4K camera package for $35,000. And it could record Raw footage to compact flash cards! The F900 and F950 recorded MPEG2 to HDCAM and HDCAM SR tape at that time.

And they were pretty unprecedented (for the cinema industry) in the way they handled upgrades - dramatically improving many aspects in their cameras through free firmware upgrades and then offering a major sensor upgrade for the cameras, whereas their competitors would just release whole new camera models.

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