RED teases new KOMODO-X camera

RED will be officially announcing a new KOMODO-X camera on May 16 and Jarred Land has already been leaking industriously about it. Here’s what we know so far.

RED is planning on expanding its KOMODO line with a new, more capable KOMODO-X that should ship in the second half of this year.

Considering that the official announcement about the new KOMODO-X doesn’t arrive until next week, there is a lot of information out there already, from opaque posts on RED CEO Jarred Land’s Insta (including bizarrely a fox actually weeing on the new camera), to a whole host of video and YouTube speculation. 

The first indications something was happening was when Jarred dialled in to a Carlos Quintero live stream at the end of April speculating about the future of the Komodo. Quintero had been referring to a wishlist, dream KOMODO-X as in ‘KOMODO X-factor’ and Jarred had been watching.

“I clicked on the live stream and you started saying some of the requests for it and I thought they were a leaked spec!” he says. “I thought ‘Oh shit, what does Carlos know?’”

The answer was actually not much. So, Jarred being Jarred, he began to fill in the gaps. Watch below from about 1:28 on. 

Essentially, he explains, the KOMODO was always intended to be a crash cam, and so it had a B-camera spec. Which is why when RED started noticing a lot of chatter about its missing features and how people were reconfiguring it to work as an A-camera, they  started paying attention and thus the idea of a more full-featured KOMODO-X was born. Quintero’s guessing of the name was just a coincidence

From there we can jump to a mammoth six hour live stream from Scott Balkum which Scott has thoughtfully condensed down into a 14 minute summary video which you can see here.

So, to summarise that in turn, this is what we know so far.

• What’s coming is not KOMODO 2. “It’s not a replacement for KOMODO by any means,” says Jarred. Rather that it’s something that will sit alongside it.
• It will be bigger to accommodate a slightly bigger top-screen
• Height and width look like being the same, length might be longer
• “If I was a betting man I would say that global shutter was important if it was going to be called KOMODO.”
• It’s going to stay in the same Super35 realm
• Media will be CFexpress
• Audio will be better
• There will be modules. Jarred picks something up that looks like it has a V-Mount on the back and says “This is one of the modules.”
• Price is not locked in yet as RED hasn’t moved into production. Think more than KOMODO but perhaps not hugely so. $10k or thereabouts
• Shipping? Possibly later this year

All this will get confirmed (or otherwise, but the leaks seem to be fairly consistent so far) next week. We'll bring you more as we get it.