Aaton Penelope Delta Delivered

The cat in the hat (J.P. Beauviala), the cat that sits on the shoulder (Aaton Penelope Delta), and the proprietors of PhotoCineRent in Paris (Albrecht Gerlach and Tatiana Pereira) at SATIS in Paris yesterday.

PhotoCineRent took delivery of their first Penelope Delta, with an additional one arriving soon — ready for rental.

Penelope Delta, in case anyone missed the news at IBC and Cinec, is Aaton’s digital 35mm camera with an optical viewfinder and spinning mirror shutter. A film-style video assist feeds HD video to on-set monitors without having to spin the mirror. Penelope Delta records to internal SSD: uncompressed linear16-bit CineDNG files. This is an open-architecture RAW format that converts directly  to ACES.

The cat-on-shoulder camera is lightweight: 7.5 kilos with internal recorder and batteries. Menus are intuitive and a cool jog-wheel calls them up.

The sensor is a Super35 format, 16:9, Dalsa CCD design that is around 3.7 K with, if I understood JP correctly, a 7K option coming soon. It is rated at 800 ISO as well as 100 ISO with its (patent pending)  mechanical multi-slit shutter. This provides a glass-less ND.9 equivalent (3 stops exposure reduction) behind the lens, without filters.

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2 Responses:

  1. Thomas Chatelet says:

    Good news!

    In any case, the definition delivered by the sensor will remain 3.7K.
    The optional increase of definition to 7K (or 5K, depending on how you do the maths) is going to be virtual.
    Just a hundred years good old trick: the camera can intensify the spatial resolution over time, like film stock did, by offsetting randomly the position of the sensor by half a pixel with each frame.
    I’m so excited by this detail!

  2. Le Poulain says:

    Jean Rouch would say a lion on the shoulder. What a combination.

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