Atomos Samurai Blade now shipping

Atomos Samurai Blade

Famous for its low-cost touchscreen field recorders, Atomos has just announced that their new Samurai Blade is now shipping

The new model is a complete rework of the Samurai, which remains available at a lower price.

The new model features an impressive 1280 x 720 IPS touchscreen, standard-size BNC connectors, full waveform and vectorscope displays, RGGB/Luma parade displays.

Low cost

Atomos has always aimed at the lower-cost end of the market, making external recorders accessible to all levels of users, without compromising quality. External recorders can give users an advantage over in-camera recording by bypassing the camera's internal compression. They do this by recording the output from the HDMI or SDI sockets on the camera equipment. These signals are always uncompressed and they represent the shortest and highest quality path for the camera's images. Another advantage for users is that by recording directly to Apple ProRes or to Avid DNxHD, footage from the camera is directly transferrable to the timeline of most NLEs. These codecs are "Edit Friendly" in that they demand less processing power from the host workstation, making editing more fluid, and usually allowing more streams (ie tracks) to be edited in real-time.

We'll be getting a Samurai Blade to test very soon, but meanwhile, full details from Atomos are given on the next page.

Melbourne, Australia – July 17th 2013

Atomos, the creator of the award-winning camera mounted recorders Ninja-2 and Samurai, and the Connect converter range, have commenced shipment of their latest recorder/monitor, the Samurai Blade.

The new Samurai Blade offers a stunning 1280 x 720 SuperAtom IPS touchscreen, at 325ppi 179-degree viewing, 400nit brightness and multi-frequency (48/50/60Hz) operation depending on video input giving super smooth monitoring and playback. Every screen is calibrated to SMPTE Rec 709 colour space and a D65 white point with 100% gamut from factory. On the fly screen calibration is built into every Samurai Blade so you are always accurate in any shooting environment.

Samurai Blade adds essential set up tools with full waveform monitor functions, including vectorscope, RGB and LUMA parades with transparent overlay and bottom right, lower 3rd or full screen positioning, making it an extremely flexible tool.

"The new screen is truly spectacular," adds Jeromy Young, CEO and Founder of Atomos. "With AtomOS 5 now offering waveform as well as monitor assist, I believe we have really raised the bar in the affordable monitor and field recorder segment. We're the first to combine professional monitor functionality with recording and deck playout, all in a space-saving, camera-mountable unit. Customers are continually amazed at the speed and low cost workflow we offer, Blade is no different".

Like its Ninja-2 and Samurai predecessors, Samurai Blade allows the recording of pristine, 10-bit images straight from the camera sensor directly to inexpensive HDD or SSD drives, captured using Apple ProRes or Avid DNxHD codecs. Waveform, vectorscope and monitor assist tools such as tri-level focus peaking, zebra, false colour and blue-only offer a very comprehensive test and shot setup tool kit. The Samurai Blade has standard BNC connectors.