By site editor Dan Chung:

BIRTV Kinefinity from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Kinefinity were showing their KineRAW Mini camera with a range of upgrades at the BIRTV show this week. I got a chance to sit down with Kinefinity’s Jihua Zheng and talk about all the new options.

Most interesting for news and documentary shooters is the RAW crop mode which works in a similar way to the one on RED cameras. With a new B4 adapter the KineRAW will now be able to use ENG lenses designed for smaller sensors and also control them using a power cable attaching to the zoom servo. This is possible because the actual sensor is 4K resolution and so a crop out of the centre still exceeds HD resolution.

Also announced at the show (but not shown) is an external DNG RAW and Cineform recorder which will allow the KineRAW Mini to get full 4K resolution out of the camera. The recorder itself is claimed to record up to 6K for future cameras.

There is also a new battery handgrip for the Mini which allows iris and shutter speed control as well as other menu settings. Upon closer inspection it appears to be a battery grip designed for a Nikon camera that has been cleverly rewired for use with the Mini. It is surprisingly comfortable in the hand.

Lastly, a firmware upgrade now allow RAW recording in 720P RAW at 100fps internally on the Mini. I haven’t tested this yet but it looks interesting.

The camera is available now is China and also in Germany from Kinefinity’s European reseller.

BIRTV video coverage by Gabriel Clermont, Jonas Schönstein and Shan Shan Wang.