A lot has been posted on the purchase of Red Digital Cinema by Nikon. Much that I’ve seen seems concentrated on the fact that the acquisition gives Nikon a significant position in the cinema market but that only part of the story I think. It’s fairly obvious and reasonable that Nikon can leverage Red’s various expertises to create a full set of video oriented cameras. I do expect that Nikon will allow Red to continue to be a pro-cinema brand and will not interfere with their cinema products; it’s likely that Red will orient themselves to the cinema world completely. I think it will be interesting to see where the Nikon branded camera’s end and the Red branded camera’s start and if there’s an overlap model or two in the videographers space or if the videographers space offerings become Nikon branded products. It’s also likely the Nikon will take over the currently outsourced manufacture of Red camera’s and other equipment - it will be an interesting question to see how the branding on that shows up. It’s easily to assume hat Nikon will take over the manufacture of Red’s optics. Still, there’s another aspect to the purchase thats worth looking at in terms of the overall industry.

Red also comes with a significant patent portfolio - the Raw compression patents are just a part of it. Another part is the global shutter technology. Another are their codec technologies. Still another are their large format image sensors. There are some hints in the financial and legal world that Sony’s global shutter is dependent on Red licensed technology (conversely Red’s global shutter and indeed all of their sensors are dependent on various Sony technology and licenses). Since complex cross licensing agreements are very common in the technology industry this has the possibility of getting interesting. I’ll note here that Sony has a history of buying licenses of technology with its implementation expertise - if they want to use your technology getting them to implement it for your product is far less expensive if you allow them to use the technology. I’ll also note that both the Sony camera and the Red camera are roughly 33MP designs - meaning that the back ends are similar, e.g. the pixel transistors are different but everything else is the same. In particular the back end bus that moves all that data to a buffer in image processor would be essentially the same (although the actual silicon could be very different looking and using different circuit designs for the same process).

Of all the possibilities is that in order to get certain cinema technologies and global shutter technologies Canon will have to license is rather legendary auto-focus capabilities. I doubt they would want to but thats the point of the portfolio - Nikon can use the portfolio directly (if it hasn’t already) in its camera’s and also use it as a cudgel to get technologies they want, such as perhaps a better autofocus system. One can argue that Canon might not give up its AF technologies to get RAW compression and thats probably true. Raw compression and global shutter is a different value proposition altogether one that I think Canon would find attractive. And keeping the EF/RF mounts as supported options on Red will just add incentive to the deal. Sony’s AF is also extremely good and they would be an equally good partner.

This is all speculation - my point is that there are additional advantages to Nikon from the acquisition beyond the additional of cinema cameras and lenses. How many of them will be utilized that we actually find out about will be interesting to see.