Red One Reservation

Jonathan Bowerbank · January 30, 2008

Has anyone tried using a defibrillator on their "Ded Red"?

Clear!

Keith Walters · January 30, 2008

Hi,

There have been other issues with the first cameras from FFD's, bent CF card pins, not booting in the cold, overheating, issues with flair & dynamic range less than 11.3 stops. I think one can ignore your figure of 3%.

Hopefully the next batch will be better still.

Stephen

Well, they do actually perform quite well, when they are working.

I would be very interested to see what is inside one of these beasts, since if the design is anything like I imagine it to be, there must have been some formidible problems with designing the power supply.

As best as I can determine, the RED draws somewhere between 60 and 100 Watts when running. Since there are no moving parts (apart from a couple of low-power fans) virtually all of that power will be consumed by the signal processing, which, (or so I imagine) would consist of mostly 1.8 Volt (or thereabouts) logic devices.

If you "do the math" it indicates that the current consumption of all this could be in the order of 30 to 55 Amps!

There would be extraordinary design problems providing that much current at such a low voltage, while keeping the voltage stable. As chips get faster they tend to use lower supply voltages, which makes them more sensitive to electrical interference, and so it makes the power supply design more critical. One problem is that 1.8 Volts at that sort of current level looks too much like a short circuit!

Large computer systems designed to be used as mini-servers often draw similar amounts of current, but they usually spend their operating life inside a roomy cabinet on a desktop with 5 inch fans, not crammed into a camera case.

I also can't help wondering whether the overheating problems they were having were due to the designer underestimating how much the supply current would heat up the copper tracks and other wiring.

Perhaps they should get someone outside the organization to "Audit" the design, the way the military sometimes do.