Gadgetory

hey folks have you heard about this red holographic phone the one that's gonna cost 1200 to 1600 dollars I'm Sean Hollister with CNET and I'm here with my colleague Patrick Holland fellow a camera and phone lover to talk about and give you an idea of what's going on here we think it's going to be something special partially because it's a crazy phone likes we've never seen before at a really high price and partially because it's a modular phone and modular phones with interchangeable parts or an idea we haven't seen work out very well yet so uh first off we want to talk about who the heck red is because you may have heard of this phone but you probably don't know who red is as a company Patrick you want to tell us a little bit about red you've got some background with them I understand yeah and actually says red is a camera maker mostly they make cinema cameras to make the films and movies I think they were founded in like the mid 2000s 2007 I believe was the first actual release of a camera and what was neat about it was a meant to be a modular system that shot at the time 4k video which was at that time a very big deal and because of that a lot of filmmakers would use this and it quickly got adopted into Hollywood like with Peter Jack's this was part of the big transition to digital they're all about film and red was one of the companies that comes along and says hey let's do this digital and they made these crazy tank like big black behemoth cameras with all these modular parts so they had kind of a head start on this whole modular thing yeah the box of it almost look like a grenade case or something it was like this big and metal and durable and because of that it was able to capture these beautiful images that would compete with the likes of at the time film and you know since then we've seen them be used on Marvel films The Hobbit and stuff like that and TV shows almost anything digital is filmed on reg Natalie all of these big-budget TV shows you see on Netflix for instance house of cards daredevil and bunch of these Marvel series they're all filmed on these red cameras even though if you've never seen one of these cameras you've probably seen what's come out of and it's beautiful like david fincher it's like one of the biggest people on that the hints the house of cards hi and stuff like that now that just to be clear there are other amazing digital cinema cameras like the RT Alexa and stuff like that had that come out cents but red was kind of the first and it's actually because the quality via the quality of the not only the image out of it but also the quality of actual camera product it's big its bulky it's meant to be used as meant to be used on location and the studio's it can be adapted to be running gun where you're putting it on a shoulder kind of like a news camera style and then they could also be adapted to have these amazing cinema lenses on it with displays and monitors out to directors we were talking before the the podcast here that you could actually tie two of these together like Peter Jackson did to shoot in 3d which he did on The Hobbit Peter Jackson used these for The Hobbit series uh what you're you're not here to talk about to hear about cameras necessarily you're here to hear about a crazy new phone and this is called the red hydrogen it's a phone that's going to be made out of titanium or aluminum alloy and it'll cost as much as sixteen hundred dollars that's just the the pre-order price for this phone I don't know if we got to a picture that we can throw up on screen it this thing here this is the only picture they gave you in order to make a purchasing decision they kind had this little teaser announcement they said hey you know we've got a phone it's gonna be this much it's gonna be made out of these metals and it's gonna have a crazy screen that likes it what you'd never seen before wouldn't you like to buy it here go ahead and buy it right now and that was all we had to go on until we started digging into some patent filings until we started looking a little bit deeper into what the company had said and the weird thing about red is for red lovers that was enough for many of them because this is a company that does this all the time they they say they're gonna do something really crazy with a product and a lot of people don't believe them you're like okay how the heck are you gonna build this crazy camera sensor out of nowhere and stick it in a body and sell it to us in this modular package but they've done it time and again so when this phone came out a lot of the red lovers were like okay I'm gonna go for that the rest of us are back here scratching our heads thinking well you know what's this company on about they've never made a phone what are they doing here and what the heck is a holographic just black as I say like so yeah they are not an electronics company so to speak like you wouldn't think of them like a Samsung or an Apple where they're creating lots of different consumer products in fact you might argue that the red cameras on a consumer product so to have something like that high-end that specific say we're gonna make a phone you're like that's crazy but that's also why it's appealing is because it just seems so out there and there's been a lot of hype because of that where if this thing you know is the holographic thing like Star Wars like Princess Leia thing or is it more like a Nintendo 3ds style what exactly is that there's a lot of questions about that there's questions about the modularity and that promo photo you could probably see there's a bunch of like brass or gold pins at the bottom yeah we're kind of hint at something that you could attach on to which we'll talk about it so I dug into a lot of this a lot of these questions for a CNET's story all about this modular phone about this holographic phone the first thing I found out which is super interesting is this technology this for view holographic video that they want to display this phone actually isn't something crazy or new it's something that scientists and researchers are trying to do for a long time basically it's kind of like stereo 3d where screen gives you two different views it's kind of like a glasses free version of that where you don't need you know it's special cinema glasses or anything to see that there's a technology in the screen to direct some of the light to one eye that's different from what goes to the other eye so you get kind of a 3d view but instead of two views they've got four views in here something called multi scopic 3d so you don't just don't need to stay in one place and see like oh this images pops out of the screen a little bit you can actually look around to the left to the right and see around an object this is not magic this is not something that red invented this is something researchers have been trying to build for a while and they just didn't have the screen technology necessary to show this off um in a device that people would actually want to buy so maybe this is one of those but that's not all that this price is about this crazy price is also about what we found in the patent filings it's going to be a phone where you have interchangeable lenses and I'm not talking about a tiny little you know a tiny little phone lens on the back of your phone like I've got on this side the Samsung here anything like that I'm talking about big honking camera lenses hooking up to these this kind of bayonet mount that you have traditionally in DSLR we found a patent for a miniature version of that that could fit on a phone and then when a certain youtube star marques Brownlee got to look at the phone today a little bit earlier this week actually he posted a via this morning he we saw that that's I'm think they're actually integrating into the phone they're going to have actual camera lenses you can hook onto this thing yeah basically kind of it turns it at see the module is kind of it looks like it does two things where it gives you a sensor you remember like the the actual sensor inside a cell phone camera is very small so that's a sensor but it also adds that like that circular area is gonna add the place where you could put on a different lens mount so I can interchange lens match which it's a whole nother crazy this is where Patrick and I Patrick and I started getting super exciting so we're super into photography both of us and we've both talked about this in the past that phones they just don't physically have what you need to take amazing amazing photos that you get with a DSLR sure they take great photos now don't get me wrong you can get amazing photos on a phone but certain things you can't do you can't do aperture control where you get different depths of field and allow different amounts of lights into the sensor based on mechanical blades there's no room for those mechanical blades in a phone right now there's no room for a big zoom lens other phones have had to get around that like the iPhone 7 plus by having two cameras on the phone one that's kind of already zoomed in and one that's not and then they kind of interpolate the distance between them to kind of give you what looks like a zoom but isn't really and you can't zoom very far with those so all of a sudden you add actual lenses onto a phone we're in a whole different ballgame well and I think it's something that should be said is I don't think this particular phones trying to appeal to the exact person that an iPhone or some of these other dual camera phones I have with like that telephone photo zoom or is I don't think it's even trying to compete with something like like the moto products that you could add on like the Hasselblad like camera package or and whatever the 3d cameras yeah moto Z phones we've seen the motor Z was one of the modular phones that said hey we're going to let you add all kinds of accessories to the back of the phone they just snap right in they magnetically snap on they've got little what they call a pogo pins or copper connectors spring-loaded copper connectors that just snap onto the back of the phone and immediately make that electrical contact and then we've got us another phone like that called essential the the founder of android i nate guy named Andy Rubin founded android he did the sidekick before that has a company called essential where they're going to clip on modular proton products to you can see on the screen in a sec there's a 360-degree camera Patrick's talking about that can click on to the back of the phone the same way yeah this is something where traditionally you're not gonna want to carry something with that big and bulbous in your pocket you're not gonna want to carry a giant camera lens in your pocket like a DSLR but once are you talking about a modular phone where this is something option where you can snap it on when you need it you can take it off when you don't all of a sudden there's room for those kinds of products to exist that's I mean that's what I think at least well I think for me as someone who does video and cinema I can't tell me people who love to use like their smartphones especially some ones that could shoot 4k or you'd get an app that allows you to record high bitrate on your smart phone and that's pretty cool but you're still limited to the actual optics and sensor the phones there and now you're able to attach something on as someone who has to use some Reds too I'm hoping it's not with the allen wrench screws like you have to do on the camera because that would be insane but who knows maybe that's the thing - well that's we did see in patents they will there is a patent diagram I found which actually shows the allen wrench screws going into several components of this phone and that maybe also if that is the case it all jokes aside that also kind of tells you where it's aimed for - I think if I'm able to trim a you know a nice camera a nice high-end phone into a cinema camera I'm competing with something like the Blackmagic pocket Cinema Camera I'm competing with image quality and controls I can get on some maybe two or three thousand dollar cinema cameras that I'm not gonna get on a phone even if I add on like the motor Z's Hasselblad camera this is gotta compete the other thing to think about is this isn't necessarily for an audience who buys a phone and then expects to had all kinds of modular camera accessories to it it's also for camera people who want to add modular phone pieces onto it because every couple of years we get faster processors in our phones we get faster Wi-Fi and 3G and Bluetooth and all these components that you only find itself on screens touch screens the touchscreen on my phone is so much more advanced than the touchscreen on my camera here I've got a Canon t4i which was one of the first Canon cameras to add a articulating touch screen on the back this thing is nowhere near the resolution nowhere near the touch everything about this touch screen is inferior to the one of my new galaxy it's almost more of an afterthought and what's interesting too I think going back to the red the hydrogen one as well is the fact that the cameras themselves the other thing besides shooting really great image quality of the red camera was that you can after a couple years hey there's new processors there's and they call it a brain module I can pay to have my camera upgraded to the newest yeah processor and that I this is with red cinnamon red cinnamon can't been doing this for years and years now and the reason I bring that up is I'm wondering also if that's going to be a case where if I buy this 1200 1600 on our phone if there's would be modules that are able to upgrade stuff like that image therefore the cinema and it looks like there might be we found some patent images you'll see them on screen in a second where we saw them pieced together multiple giant pieces of phone so you'd have your one phone piece with like these these special ridges on it so you can grip it well and then you stick these other pieces on there and one of them could be a battery attachment and one of them can be inputs and outputs you can hook it up to a monitor and one of them can be a stabilization model you can have module where you can have image stabilization for the entire unit and then the one on the end is an actual entire camera sensor and lens assembly so you can stick those interchangeable lenses on there so not just the lenses are interchangeable the camera sensor could be as well so in a year or two maybe you put an 8k sensor on there instead of a 4k sensor whatever it is on a smart phone on us I mean there's no smart phones that ship with seven 20 HD video so they'll be able to shoot 8k video on a smartphone is insane another thing with red is their images on the cameras are RAW images so when you take a photo like with your Canon there you can either get JPEGs which most phones shoot in a JPEG where the camera or the phone is processing that image for you or you can get a raw image where it allows you to control some of the settings after the fact more in depth so when the red cameras came out and were able to shoot raw video and you're able to like get your colors back and those like highlights if they're blown out a lot of cool post-processing I'm gonna do with it makes me wonder like what I'm gonna be able to do with that hydrogen-1 and also the name hydrogen-1 I don't know if you're familiar and all joking aside the there was a chipset for the red camera called the helium and I'm wondering if this is like at all like something tied to that or that chips gonna be in that module that we saw or that in that add-on for all we know they take the same sensor from the cinema cameras and they put it in the phone in the future that would be insane I don't know I mean this is mind-blowing now as my dad or brother gonna buy this thing definitely not that's that's the question so I think I think that because red has such a history with modular cameras and because their audience is small enough and they don't need to like go out of their way to blow away the everyday consumer they can afford to be successful with a niche modular phone product but where a lot of other companies have just given up like for instance I went to see the the project our guys the Google project ara guys a while back and they were trying to build this modular phone for everybody and they were talking about oh it could be only you know three hundred dollars for the frame and then you could add on these extra components and you can change out your processor every year and then they had to pull back their ambitions a little bit and they said well you know people kind of want to have the best of everything that goes into a phone every couple years we'll just make it a few additional modules like a like a camera like a you know it's special while you could have a a pollution alert if you live somewhere where there's a lot of pollution a little sensor in there that monitors the carbon monoxide levels or something like that just a limited module thinks and even that was too much for them they they got folks in there they had of executives there said no we need to build a mass-market product and they shuttered the whole project and now a bunch of those project ara folks they're working for Facebook now possibly on a phone they're a bunch of hires there around modularity so maybe Facebook is doing something there but we've seen some of these high-profile failures around modularity Google LG moto even moto who's building a whole line of moto Z phones around this but their moto mods initiative they don't seem to have a lot of stuff going on there is this the company that can make it work on a miniature scale on a niche scale and then could they take that expertise and go a little further is there room in the market for a phone that's this expensive for everyday consumers honestly I think there is I mean I think those failures of those other phones is it was like kind of modularity for modularity sake like it feels like hey yeah we made this road and there could be this kind of car that goes down or the kind of truck but we haven't figured out exactly who's gonna use the road there's no cars on the road yet there's no cars where I think what Rhett saying is hey we're gonna make this path and it's gonna specifically be for something similar that we've already done in our camera line which is a modular approach different albeit but at least in the same vein in the patents I looked at Reds patents for the modular phone they the patent is like three-quarters their original patents for modular cameras showing that they've had such a history here but like but yet this this high-end this question of high price for a phone is gonna come up not just once this year because there's also the Galaxy Note 8 coming up there is the iPhone the latest iPhone it looks like there's going to be a high-end iPhone that might cost $1200 compared to the normal iPhones where you get in there for like 650 on the ground this one could be a thousand eleven hundred $1200 for an iPhone so this question of is there room for a high-end phone I think we're gonna get it asked several more times this here where I think red has an interesting advantage where I think modularity actually has an interesting advantage is that people can buy the parts they want they can kind of make this investment in the future because they're gonna add additional parts down the road and they can and it can open up parts that just wouldn't be available in a phone previously previously you to justify a really mass-market phone you have to have kind of a one-size-fits-all part your camera your modem your processor and that's to go in millions hundreds of millions of phones in order to be a legitimate business which is why Nvidia companies like Nvidia dropped out of the mobile chip game they said hey we can't get our Tegra processors and phones we don't have the the economies of scale that a company like Qualcomm does to get it there we don't have the deals in place that Qualcomm does so we just can't make it at all because we can't get the deals with phone manufacturers but if you had a modular processor nvidia could sell it on its website and but it could sell it like a graphics card like the excel graphics cards right now anybody could buy that thing and stick it into their phone they don't need to have all these middlemen in the way I don't need to have all these Oh am building the smart phones in order to build that processor that same goes for camera companies they want to build a cam a new camera goes on this doesn't need to be red building the lenses that go on this camera or the sensors or the or the adapters that could be another company could be another company building those modules so I mean I think if you have the smartphone market as a whole I do think there is room on the high end and whether it's something very specific and modular like this hydrogen one is seeming to be or something like a high-end iPhone or a high-end Samsung phone I think there's definitely room for that stuff and I also think on the bottom of the market which we cover a lot too with budget phones the lower end is getting so much better that it's kind of you know you're raising all ships by raising rising beside raises all ships yeah by having that bottom and have such premium feature sets on some of these budget phones I think that also lifts it and also it allows people going wow what else can I get so you have tiers of things like you do whenever right there's a spectrum obviously it was very much you want a new phone you're gonna pay $650 for a good one or you're gonna pay less for a crappy one and now it's you can pay $200 for a good phone you can pay 70 in some cases for a good enough phone and then your 650 is a better phone and your 850 is an even better phone and maybe there's room in that market for a $1200 $1300 $1600 phone for those who see the use cases for cinema and photography yeah and I think you know come back to like you've brought that the Apple rumors like that yeah I mean currently this in the phones they have you have the seven and then seven plus and there are big differences not only the size of the phone but in the functionality of what it can do and you are paying a premium to have that functionality right and I think it's in the interesting like kind of you dip in the tone of water for Apple like well man if we if we did something better with us of some way or what if we did these things I've already said you want a better camera pay a little bit more you get our bigger phone with a better camera doesn't necessarily need to be the bigger phone maybe it's just better and better camera that is one of the top things readers asked for us they say absolutely alone is the best camera and we look at Samsung - I mean there's maybe they're gonna be this other note phone coming out and that usually is a their premium their top-of-the-line thing it's usually a lot more expensive so I think for red to compete it does something very specific kind of thinking about like almost like a sandbox and they're gonna have this little corner over there that no one really occupies and I think if they're able to pull this off we I'm gonna go back to that holographic screen for a second yes I think that's the other question here we talked a lot about the camera side the modularity the price but I think that screen is curious cuz they able to actually pull that technology off on a phone that could be really impressive and that does put them at a little of their own corner of the sandbox where I don't know anyone else is doing something but what nobody understands including the read existing read customers is how they're going to shoot that content how they're going to film for view content I mean there's ways to do it right now but like so sounds like a way to do so it sounds like there could possibly even be a need for a camera or something the captured content like that and I'm not trying to be a smartass here but I do think that you can see that anything thanks I try but I do think that there is a possibility that you know this opens up you know a new wave of capturing things whether it's for that specific kind of content I don't know how a RvR would work on if you recorded off such a device or if you'd have a special modular module for something like that yeah or how it's gonna play with stuff like Android or Google tango I mean there's so many so many questions this on the great it hasn't gone off the ground yet Google tango has this all these sensors these dual cameras in this time of flight sensor all these crazy things they put together so you can see you can like kind of measure the real world around you and turn it all into augmented reality they haven't been able to sell a lot of phony manufacturers on that but what if that was a modular product you just stick on the back of this phone yeah all of a sudden you've got a place for that to go a place where a platform where people can try the latest and greatest technologies for smart phones so here's the thing here's here's though here's the rub the the thing that my colleague Scott Stein brought up earlier and in one of our meetings he was saying but red you know and in these other companies do you really want to get locked into their ecosystem because there aren't any standards for modularity right now if you buy this red phone or if you buy that red modular camera or whatever it is do you have to only buy red products to attach to them do you have to only buy red approved modular products to attach them do you want to get locked into that Eco so I keep my mind goes immediately to Apple and think of something like the Lightning connector right where that was supposed to be some of that was good maybe possibly widely adapted but is not only proprietary but to have products plug into that that is made by a third party to have to go through a basically a certification process part of me thinks to launch this successfully I think it's okay for red in a way to have a be proprietary because that's been their success on the camera side yeah I mean they do lock you into their solid state drive cartridges their battery adapters all this other kind of stuff you can use third-party batteries with a red camera we have to buy Reds adapter to put the battery and that gets into the other part so I mean there are things where it yeah it would be great to have a standard for modularity and I mean there's kind of two big names that could leave that which would be Google or Apple in the sense that I would think of it at the tie and also the functionality of the operating system and so whether that is like hey we have it's gonna be these twelve pins and you can have certain phone to have that and it interconnects with all these different products that have been certified by Google or whoever that board would be and that would be cool but I just don't know if there's a demand for that kind of you know is it gonna be like a USB kind of thing where yeah all these companies are working together on a standard to evolve it over the years to I mean Scott was saying maybe it could even be Wireless maybe that's the kind of standard we need is something where they don't have to have all these little copper contacts in between them they can use 60 gigahertz these are something else that's short-range and very fast in the wireless realm to transfer the power to transfer the data to do all that kind of stuff the one advantage to proprietary right now is it's got a heck of a lot of bandwidth possible you can do you can do whatever you want through your own custom backbone in a modular system compared to you to get these specific limitations for USB for Thunderbolt for lightning for all these other different port schemes that are out there right now but on the flip side if you want something like a batter in your phone you can buy a USB battery today and plug it into just about any phone with a micro USB port and it works you can even add an adapter a little adapter for lightning whereas if you buy a red battery panic for a red phone or a Motorola MOTO Z mod for the Moto phone it's gonna be obsolete if you ever have to get rid of that phone yeah absolutely and I mean the thing that I also consider - you're talking about like be able to transfer that content if you're shooting 4k 6k I don't know even 8k I don't know who knows what the things gonna shoot and I'm shooting at a high bitrate a really a big fat file that's gonna I need a lot of information I need some is good to be fast to that and wireless is definitely not there even on a high end to transfer that amount of data I know wrong I need I need a connection that's hard like a hardware connection that's gonna transfer that data quickly but I do think Scott's right I think over time that's gonna be the way it works and isn't that a central phone kind of isn't how work they talk about wireless USB isn't that what that is essential is using a wireless transfer protocol from what I understand those copper contacts are there for power and to sync the thing but not necessarily for the data transfer the data is supposed to be wireless there so that's something to look forward to maybe I wanna I want to leave this on one last interesting note about this film one other unique thing about this phone that we haven't seen before and that read has several patents on multiple one patent and two patent applications in process the ridges on the side of this phone this phone has big metal ridges on each end if you want to put the we'll have those on screen in a second with a nice blown-up image of those ridges it is scalloped to such a degree and it's got these tiny little ridges in there too to help you grip this thing and Patrick had an interesting observation about where those ridges might have come from - yeah I mean obviously we're seeing someone's hand hold it and you could see where your fingers might fit when you held those especially have bigger hands like me I could see that being a very comfortable thing but also again coming back to the nerd cinema guy a lot of like prime lenses especially if you're using you know have I golden icons or point Lander lenses a lot of those lenses the focus ring on them has scalloped edges sometimes which when I first saw that it's like oh it looks like the side of a lens and your reaction was like really and then I shot you all these like pictures of lenses yeah yeah that makes sense my lens here only has just the basic ridges on it doesn't have the big scalloped ones like you'll see on some some of these Voigtlander and older older older primes special yeah mostly primes but I think what's neat about that is there's a nod to not only that the way when you look at that phone if you were to show a picture of a red camera next this the box even in the brain of it next to that phone you could definitely see everything from like the little like red jewel in the middle I'm a logo too like it looks like a heatsink I don't know if that's practical or distorted design I thought I heard in his video that there might be carbon fiber on the body which is kind of crazy - for - left like the white like the Wi-Fi and like seculars so yes I was using all some of the same design cues and materials that you've got an all-metal phone you need to have some kind of antenna break somewhere for the wireless signals to get out exactly and also I know we don't think we always a big question not only on a smartphone camera but durability you know like if this thing is main had a titanium and carbon fiber I'm gonna feel pretty good about if it drops or or I don't know how the screen would yeah I'm not aware people who are listening titanium is crazy strong you know like an REI or something they'll sometimes sell cups made of titanium for backpackers and other instruments made for backpackers because backpackers need to have very very light backpacks I need to take as little weight with them as possible so they can carry you know days and days worth of food and clothing and things like that they are so strong go go ahead and try to bend one of those yeah one of those parts of the space shuttle was made out of titanium - yeah it's like a light it's one of the lightest metals that has that rigidity and strength that you need to fly people to space right that technology if I have space shuttle technology in my hand shooting a video I'd feel really good about that yeah sounds great I say space shuttle I should say uh yeah I mean aluminum alloy I came from you know a lot of a lot of aircrafts use aluminum alloys I can throw aluminum under the bus we could do that and we've put velcro on it and drink some Tang and we're like all NASA NASA we're gonna do our NASA set of a documentary with our red hydrogen one camera and the modular 8k whatever it's gonna be yes I will gladly accept an offer from red ass because I would do that to Harvey I totally do the heartbeat alright thanks so much for chatting me about this yeah it's super exciting I'm super excited we can't wait to get our hands on one one actually is ready to go alright guys well thanks for watching and you can check out our full article about the hydrogen including those patent drawings and see Netcom you