Both Sony and Panasonic have announced consumer 4K cameras for under $1000. Sony has announced the FDR-AX33 for $999 (you can read about it at Cinescopophilia) and Panasonic has announced the $899 HC-VX870 and it’s strange double shooting HC-WX970 for $999 (You can also read about it at Cinescopophilia).
This blows my mind. This is reaching back to the DV revolution. Not that most people need 4K, but as an editor 4K seems like such an opportunity. Just shoot a little wider and to be able to push in and still have full 1080 resolution is mind-blowing to me. And the ability to have 4K footage to do image stabilization (now that Premiere Pro has such good built in Image Stabilization) will really change things.
Now of course these are consumer cameras, with consumer compression (though Sony does mention 100MB compression) and consumer lenses, but still for grabbing quick b-roll shots these would be amazing.
I don’t think 4K will take off at home any time soon. The TV’s are still too expensive, and since most content is 1080, it will actually look worse on a 4k screen than a 1080 screen. And until they figure out how to broadcast in 4K easily (and my TV already shows how bad the compression looks on many shows in 1080!) or a disc based format for 4K it will not take off! I mean Netflix’s 4K compression is around 15 mb per second, which is about half of what a blu-ray is (sure it is probably newer and better compression, but still you are losing a huge amount of data there). And a disc format would always be superior just for bandwidth considerations.
4K excited me for what it could mean for 1080.
Of course this all depends on DP’s as I have had 5K footage for a 1080 broadcast that was shot so extreme close up that it was useless to me to push in or for it to be 5K at all, but the possibilities do exist.