Sony announces a $2K, 4K camcorder

It's CES week, and Sony has gone and done it; they announced a 4K camcorder for $2,000. Wow.

It's almost like I predicted it...wait a minute, I sort of did back in September (When cometh the $1,000 4K video camera?)

Am I unusually prescient? Unfortunately, no. But if past isn't prologue, then this is one of the worst cases of déjà vu, because Sony did a very similar thing when they starting releasing HD camcorders. First there was the HDR-FX1. Six months later, Sony announced the HDR-HC1, with an MSRP of $1,999.

This is the HDR-HC1:


And here's the FDR-AX100 camcorder they just announced:


And you can pre-order it for $1,999.

Now as a 4K camera for doing a 4K production, I'm not that interested in this camera as I doubt I'll be giving anyone footage in 4K for at least a year...but I wonder what the 4K footage scaled down to HD will look like, and whether being able to crop the 4K picture when converting to HD will make this a useful tool.

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