After three years of being embarrassed by the guys over at Red Digital Cinema, one of the big players in the high-resolution camera market has finally caught up. The company ARRI has finally released the specifications on a 4K camera that might be able to keep up with the RED One. The camera will be called the ALEXA this should come out with a price tag under about $60k.

Now that may sound like a lot of money, but for a professional camera it is not. Of course they have to take into consideration the 28k camera that RED has in the works, but at least it is a start. The ALEXA will allow you to record in a few native formats besides the RAW 4k footage. You get compressed 1080p in Apple's ProRes 444 and 422 (HQ) QuickTime formats. The cool thing there is that you can edit this directly in Final Cut without the need to transcode the footage. Of course, everything will change with the RAW 4k footage from RED when April 12th and Adobe CS5 hit the streets...But that is for another article.