Red camera, NAB and vaporware!

Although my star doesn't burn bright enough in the broadcast engineering sky to warrant a trip to Vegas to see the newest things in TV and Film technology there has been a lot of online chatter relating to the Red HD/DI/EFP (whatever?!) camera. It's a >4k res aquisition device and here is the blurb from their website:

Typical high-end HD camcorders have 2.1M pixel sensors and record with 3:1:1 color subsampled video at up to 30fps. We deliver 11.4M pixels at up to 60fps and record RAW, or 2x over-sampled HD in 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 - your choice. That’s more than 5 times the amount of information available every second and a vastly superior recording quality. Don’t need all that data for your workflow? Dial it back, and keep all the other advantages of the Mysterium Super 35mm cine sized (24.4 x 13.7mm) sensor. You get the same breathtaking Depth of Field and selective focus as found in film cameras. Mysterium boasts a greater than 66db Signal to Noise Ratio thanks to its large 29 sq. micron pixels. And 11,480,800 pixels deliver resolution that can only be called Ultra High Definition.

Given that they are proposing selling this gadget for somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of what you'd currently pay for a Viper etc then you have to take notice. Also bear in mind that these guys normally manufacture sunglasses. The argument I've heard is that being an optical company Oakley are well placed for this kind of product but I think it's fair to say that optics aren't the bottleneck in digital cinema cameras at the moment - it's all the stuff encompassed by their "mysterium" sensor and the resultant data-load.
I showed the picture of the camera to my thirteen year-old and his response was "cool"! It looks like a weapon out of Halo - which is why there is such a buzz on the web - the Mac community love it. Never mind that all they are showing is an aluminium mock-up, it looks cool.

I suppose I'll reserve judgement - I hope I'll be suprised but I expect not. It put me in mind of an all encompassing-price bustin' NLE/production system from about ten years ago - the Trinity Play system that showed at IBC/NAB etc. for a couple of years but never shipped (I had one on order for a year!). While I was looking it up on the web I noticed that Kiki Stockhammer (one of their founders) - who used to do a really good demo - is now playing in an LA SciFi punk band called Warp 11 - amazing!