Mini-HD DVR

Atomos announces big brother to Ninja, the Samurai

2 Comments Published by Matthew Jeppsen March 22nd, 2011 in Formats, News, Storage

Whether by throwing star or blade, Atomos really has it out for you. Last fall they announced the Ninja, a compact self-contained recorder unit that uses off-the-shelf SSD or 2.5″ hard drives to record ProRes media via HDMI input, and features a 4.3″ touchscreen with playback and monitoring features. As of today, Ninja is officially shipping worldwide for $995.

And now, the latest Atomos pre-NAB news is the big brother to the Ninja, a device called Samurai that expands nicely on what the Ninja has to offer. As a side note, ‘samurai’ is hard to spell.

Samurai is a device similar to Ninja, but includes a larger hi-res 5″ touchscreen, HD-SDI inputs (and pass-through) capable of recording ProRes to SSD or hard drive, 3D/genlock support, and offers FireWire 800, USB 2 and 3 interfaces for quick transfer to your editing workstation. All for $1495, and reportedly available in Summer 2011. Here’s the full featureset noted in the press release:

Samurai builds on all the strengths of Atomos’ groundbreaking HDMI Ninja, namely:
* Records, monitors and has instant on-board playback of ready-to-edit, visually-lossless Apple ProRes files – all in one portable, self-contained unit
* Bypasses the image-degrading compression needed to squeeze HD onto in-camera flash storage
* Eliminates capture cards and the time-wasting capture process by recording to a high-quality editing codec direct from the camera
* Uses limitless and cheap removable 2 ½ inch hard disks for the lowest cost storage in an external recorder
* Records to SSDs (Solid State Drives)
* Very low power consumption
* Banishes worries about battery life with “Dual Looping”, hot-swappable battery operation
* Recycles older cameras with obsolete tape and compression technology, and updates them with a modern, high-quality file-based workflow

Samurai adds:
* HD/SD SDI inputs and pass-through
* A bigger, 5” touchscreen/monitor with double the Ninja’s linear resolution (800×480)
* Real-time hardware-based 3:2 pulldown for extracting 24p from 60i PsF recordings
* Timecode and Genlock
* Screen Flipping
* Multi-camera support (with multiple Samurais)
* 3D support (with 2 genlocked Samurais)
* 14.4 V compatibility