The warriors at Atomos continue to generate more strong additions for the production arsenal. One new recruit is the Ronin, a rack-mountable monitor, recorder and deck for studio and live video production. The Ronin is comfortable in controlled environments and one the road, due to its ability to work audio through its stereo XLR inputs and outputs. Then get introduced to the Samurai Blade, a versatile tool that can record your video and double as a monitor. Of course, any Ninja or Samurai can do these, where the Samurai Blade provides expertise is with 1280×720 resolution and a size that is suitable for on-camera mounting. The full set of features for the Samurai Blade include BNC connectors, a 5-inch SuperAtom IPS touch screen, and recording directly from the sensor at 10-bit, 4:2:2 DNxHD or ProRes.
Great recording capability in the Samurai Blade is compounded like a double-edged sword with many desirable monitor functions including waveform vectorscope, RGB and luma parade. There's also adjustable gamma, contrast, brightness, and the ever helpful false color, focus assist and zebra monitoring. The Samurai Blade as well as the Ronin can take the timecode from the camera and trigger recording on some of the biggest types of cameras. Atomos continues to incorporate 2.5-inch disks as the media which will make for very fast transferring of video files. We're also glad they continue to maintain stamina with their continuous power battery system, and the Samurai Blade adds new strengths like hot swappable disks.
With competitive prices, Atomos is a solid fighter for video recording and monitoring, and the Samurai Blade is no exception, at $1,295. The Ronin however is quite a hired hand at $1,995, but the 1/2-rack unit size and audio capability should make it worth keeping around.
