Origin camera

The Dalsa Origin is the first camera designed and built by Dalsa Corporation to be used specifically for cinematography.

Dalsa touts its camera as offering sufficient increases in quality including a roughly 4K by 2K, uncompressed, Bayer pattern, image output with 12 stops of linear exposure lattitude sampled at 16-bits per channel. The company also claims that there camera is the first digital camera "designed with the cinematographer in mind" citing the fact that the camera uses ordinary 35mm lenses (Digiprime), focuses on a single charge coupled device that is the size of a 35mm film gate, and features an optical viewfinder.

While the specifications of this camera are impressive to many cinematographers, Dalsa's system appears to have many drawbacks that could prevent the current model from replacing film as the most desirable medium and oversteping its competition in the digital market. Most notable is the problem of storage. The camera has no onboard storage capability and must be tethered to a digital storage device such as a RAID array or an HD deck. The cost of recording the large amount of data generated in its highest quality mode, is similar if not more expensive than 35mm film at this time. Most likely the first niche that this camera is suited for is special effects photography employing digital compositing and travelling matte photography on larger budget productions. At this point the system remains untested by the filmmaking world.

The Dalsa Origin is available for rental only, using a bussiness model similar to Panavision.