As soon as Nikon announced its surprising acquisition of the U.S.-based cinema company, RED, in March, people began speculating about what the move would mean for Nikon and RED cameras alike.
The following month, PetaPixel reported that Nikon and RED engineers had already begun working with each other, but that a new camera using both Nikon and RED technology was still ” a few years” out. Developing new cameras takes a long time, after all.
In an interview with Nippon, Nikon’s president Muneaki Tokunari reiterated the company’s plans to improve its video technology and pointed toward the potential to increase Nikon’s market share among video users and the industry at large by leveraging the technology it acquired when it purchased RED for $85 million.
Tokunari points specifically to the increasing demand for video features and functions in mirrorless cameras and notes the overall recovery of the interchangeable lens camera market, calling Nikon’s purchase of RED a “business opportunity” to boost camera sales.
Earlier this month, PetaPixel reported that new CIPA results showed that the worldwide digital camera market hit a three-year high.
The Nikon executive also notes that increasing sales in China have significantly contributed to the camera industry’s recovery.
“Sales in China have grown to a level similar to those of Europe, while growth is big in emerging countries such as those in South Asia,” Tokunari explains.
Speaking to RED specifically, Nippon writes, “Japan’s Nikon Corp. aims to expand its market share for cameras by utilizing the video technologies of a U.S. movie camera company it acquired in spring, President Muneaki Tokunari has said.”
At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) exposition in Las Vegas in April, Nikon and RED executives told PetaPixel that “Future products will be a kind of combination of each’s strong technologies. After the completion of the acquisition on April 8, the engineers from both companies started communicating and sharing information with each other. Both engineers, their style of approaching tech is similar, so we expect that those will keep a synergistic effect for the future of the business.”
Nikon’s Keiji Oishi, now RED’s new CEO, noted RED’s compression technology and color science expertise. However, Hiroyuki Ikegami, executive vice president and General Manager of Nikon’s Imaging Business Unit, added that understanding and integrating RED’s technology will take time.
In the shorter term, Nikon is actively investigating ways to support 16-bit REDCode RAW in its existing Nikon Z cameras, like the Z8, Z9, or new Z6 III. (LINKS) “Please expect something, not soon, but in the near future,” Ikegami said in April.
“We understand each other and will develop something and hope to make a really ‘wow’ product together. Nikon, MRMC, and RED: these three companies’ collaboration will generate a really great future, we believe,” Ikegami said.
“Each brings something to the table that each can benefit from. It’s very exciting to see where the roadmap can go even if it takes a few years to get there. It’s exciting to see those elements together,” Oishi added.
Image credits: Nikon