AJA is now shipping its Ki Pro Ultra Plus

For anyone who remembers the first generation of HD decks this might as well be magic

We were impressed when AJA first announced the Ki Pro Ultra Plus back at NAB and the good news is that it’s now shipping.

The Ki Pro Ultra Plus is a multi-channel recorder offering 1,2,3 or 4-channel simultaneous HD recording up to 1080 50/60p. Switch it into single channel mode, meanwhile, and you get 4K/UltraHD/2K/HD recording and playback, with full HDMI 2.0 input and output (up to 12-bit capture and output). Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD MXF are both supported.

It also offers decent I/O flexibility and has a range of connectivity options from 3G-SDI to HDMI 2.0 and fibre. Users can record four channels of HD simultaneously as ProRes files, each with different compression profiles, to AJA Pak 1000, 512 or 256 SSD media, with eSATA options also available.

It also has its own LCD screen which can display the channels in a quad split during capture for confidence monitoring, or that signal can be output over HDMI, SDI, fibre, and the device’s web-based UI.

It’s a neat little package housed in a portable 2RU half-rack and, as we said back in May, is the closest thing we've seen to a genuine replacement for a studio deck. What’s more, at a price point of $3995 it’s around a tenth of the price — not to mention probably a tenth of the weight — of an HDCAM deck.