New Samurai Blade engraver

Atomos, the maker of the Ninja-2 and Samurai field recorders, introduced its next generation with Samurai Blade last week.

Although the company does not offer 4K recording at the moment, they are improving their products in response to user requests.

Samurai Blade introduces the SuperAtom IPS (1280 x 720) display, which features great sharpness, brightness and color accuracy. This renovation is due to the fact that the original Samurai screen received many complaints about its lack of brightness and the amount of pressure it required to respond tactilely.

Now with 325 DPI and one million pixels, the new Atomos touch screen offers complete control over gamma, brightness and contrast for monitoring and playback. It also includes waveform, vectorscope and RGB/luma parade.

Samurai Blade is powered by the new AtomOS 5 and combines recording, monitoring and playback in a portable device that can be mounted on the camera. It is compatible with most Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, JVC, ARRI and RED cameras.

Like its predecessors, this model allows the recording of 4:2:2, 10-bit images directly from the camera sensor in Apple ProRes or DNxHD editing codecs, thus facilitating downstream workflows. It uses 2.5″ HDD or SSD disks.

Other features include three levels of focus peaking, zebra, false color and blue-only.

In addition, it now uses standard BNC connectors, instead of the mini-BNC connectors that used to require adapters.

The Samurai Blade recorder will be released in May with a price tag of $1,295. Effective immediately, the price of the Samurai drops to $995. You can read all its specifications here.