Blackmagic trails URSA Cine 17K with massive 65mm sensor

Coming later this year, the Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K takes the recently announced URSA Cine 12K concept and uprezzes it all the way into the 65mm sphere.

If you didn’t watch the Blackmagic NAB reveal, then you missed one of those classic ‘and one final thing’ moments that the likes of Steve Jobs made famous when between the URSA Cine 12K and PYXIS 6K reveals, Grant Petty reached under the desk and pulled out a whole new camera.

And what a camera. It’s based around a new 17k chip that the company is developing and will form the basis of the URSA Cine 17K which is due to launch by the end of the year. It has the same number of photo sites as the new 12k chip and the same 16-stops of dynamic range.

Here it is being held by Petty alongside the current 12k chip.

And here’s the full spec.

That’s 140,860,800 pixels in case you were wondering.

The Cine 17K and 12K have been developed alongside each other, and so the 12K has effectively been designed to handle 17k speeds. There are definite differences to accommodate the sheer size of that sensor, though. For a start it’s having to deploy LPL and Hasselblad lens mounts and the ND filters have been jettisoned as there simply is no room for them.

The Cine 17K won’t ship till the end of the year as supply chains organise themselves and  the software undergoes some tweaks. Pricing is yet to be decided as well, but we’d imagine the company will try and bring it in for around $25k.