Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K Full Frame

Last Updated: March 25, 2024

The new Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K Full Frame is the company’s first full frame camera and what they call “a completely new direction for our camera systems”.

Price information usually comes at the end of any breaking news, but we made an exception for the new Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K Full Frame. The company always likes to surprise with what it can offer and at what price. Even so, the $2595 price point of the BCC6K is something extraordinary.

“We like to be disruptive and affordable; those are the two key words,” said Craig Heffernan, technical sales director for the EMEA region, when he showed the world the main features of the new camera last week.

“What we have here now is what we believe is a very complete package that offers a high-quality 6K full frame camera solution for digital filmmakers,” he added. And, based on the specifications, it looks like the company has hit the nail on the head.

Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K: summary of the main specifications

Let’s start with a quick summary of the main specifications:

36 x 24mm full frame 6K 6048 x 4032 sensor.
Open gate 3:2, full height 6:5 anamorphic and Super 35 for creating cinematic content.
L-mount compatible, with a wide range of photography and cinema lenses.
Records at full resolution up to 36 fps or 120 fps with cropping.
Extremely fast recording on CFexpress cards.
Adjustable LCD screen with 1500 nits HDR.
Optional Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera Pro viewfinder.
Larger NP-F570 battery, optional Blackmagic Pocket Camera Battery Pro grip.

Summary of features

“What we mainly have is a full-frame camera system with an L-mount; the size of our sensor is three by two, or 36 by 24 millimeters, with an output resolution of 6048 x 4032,” said Heffernan. “Beyond the numbers, what’s really useful is that we have a pixel size of 5.94 microns. So what that allows us within that resolution, within that larger aperture system, is to get a very good photocell-based autofocus sensor that we can work with. This sensor will also be in line with the sensors in our Pocket Camera. And it has dual ISO, with native values of 400 and 3200.

“It inherits our Blackmagic color science, it inherits all the developments we’ve had in the Pocket family and with the Ursa 12K camera systems over the years, and then we add sensor size, resolution, double ISO and a dynamic range of 13 stops. I’m completely convinced that here we have a camera that will be a full frame monster in low light conditions.

“All in all, I’m very excited to see what this camera can do in terms of imaging.”

L-Mount

It’s an intriguing prospect. Blackmagic Design is now part of the L-Mount Alliance, and the introduction of this alone increases the camera’s creative potential considerably, giving users access to the full range of Primes, Supers and Anamorphic lenses. Here’s a table from the company showing various Frame Rates, Image Circle and Anamorphic Modes.

“Open Gate? We know it’s not a term that applies to digital, but it’s useful to describe that we’re using the full height and width of the sensor,” said Heffernan. “That means you can make the choice as a content creator or director of what you want to do with it. You can crop it, you can scale it, you can work in four-by-three – you can even deliver in four-by-three if you want to.”

Basically, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K can shoot in all standard resolutions and frame rates, from HD to DCI 4K and even 6K. Customers can even take photos at 24.6 megapixels. The Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K can shoot up to 36 fps at 6048 x 4032 3:2 open gate or 60 fps at 6048 x 2520 2.4:1 and 60 fps at 4096 x 2160 4K DCI. For higher frame rates, customers can window the sensor and shoot up to 100 fps at 2112 x 1184 Super 16. Customers can even work in true anamorphic 6:5 at much higher resolutions than other cameras using anamorphic lenses in 4.8K at 24 fps at 4838 x 4032. Customers can even shoot at 120 fps in 1080HD.

The Exchange? No ND Filters

As you can see, Blackmagic has chosen to use the same format as the company’s Pocket Cinema cameras. “It’s a known product, and it’s something we can build on,” said Heffernan.

But while the BCC6K adds an Optical Low Pass Filter, which could make it a popular choice in the LED space, it does mean that the designers had to do away with ND filters.

“The L-mount itself is slightly shallower in terms of the focal length of the flange… and unfortunately, that means we’ve had to remove the ND filters that we have on the 6K Pro,” said Heffernan. “We simply couldn’t fit the mechanical assembly into the camera between the sensor plane and the aperture. So we lose that, but we gain the Optical Low Pass Filter and the L-mount, so it’s a balance. I don’t think it’s a bad trade-off. Hopefully, if you plan to use them, you might prefer the screw-in filters, or you could also use a matte box and tray. So I think it’s going to be perfectly acceptable.”

Igual, mas Diferente

But while the BCC6K may look like one of the company’s Pocket cameras, it’s not.

“Although the external appearance of the camera is the same, internally, it’s a completely new architecture. It’s a new design, so the guts of the camera are new generation,” explained Heffernan. “We’re driving it like a movie camera and not just in name, but clearly in feature set and what it does. Where the Pocket camera systems are quite utilitarian and we can use them, for example, with our ATEM production tools, we don’t have those core tools built into this camera. So it won’t work with ATEM products; it doesn’t have the controls and the technical capability to work with those products today.”

What it does have is the ability to work with all kinds of Blackmagic RAW, the same external control systems that exist for the Pocket family, and it has a gyroscope, so if camera position data is something you need to extract metadata from in Resolve, you can do it easily.

There’s a bright 5-inch HDR touchscreen. On-screen overlays show recording status and parameters, histogram, focus indicators, levels, frame guides and much more. Customers can quickly apply 3D LUTs to monitor images with the desired color and look. The LCD monitor can be tilted up to 180 degrees and tilted up to 47 degrees, so it’s easy to monitor the image from virtually any position. In addition, the HDR display has a brightness of 1500 nits, so customers can always frame the image, even in bright sunlight.

There has also been a change to CFexpress.

“CFexpress allows us to use more robust digital media,” said Heffernan. “In a digital camera system, it’s better for higher and faster data rates and for sustained data rates. It’s mainly more reliable, to be honest. Cfast was designed for burst photography at most and then adapted to video, while CFexpress is more of a video-based support system. There’s also no SD slot, but there is USB-C, so you can use the usual external drives.”

(See our blog article on the Top 5 best external ssd for 2024)

And that’s all for now. We’ve become used to Blackmagic throwing curveballs at the industry over the past few years, but every now and then, it manages to pull another trick out of its sleeve that makes us pay attention. And the Black Magic Cinema Camera 6K does just that.

Here’s a link to some pretty impressive footage of beta testers.

*(Some articles may have been written or structured with Artificial Intelligence, but they were all reviewed, improved and rewritten by a Human.)

**(May Contain Affiliate Links. It means I may earn a commission every time you click on one of the external links, but do not worry. There is no additional cost to you, on the contrary, Sometimes you can even have extra benefits and discounts. And you will be helping to maintain the blog. For more detailed information consult my Affiliate Disclosure Statement)