Mark Toia is a well known name in the RED community. The high-end advertising photographer turned director has shot many beautiful things on RED over the years.

He is also one of the lucky few to have been able to shoot on the new 8K sensor. His latest video shows just what it can do and he muses about just what it is that makes it so special to him.

The obvious takeaways from the video are that you can push this sensor much harder than the previous 6K and 5K sensors. Toia says the blacks are richer, cleaner and smoother. High ISO shooting examples in the video seem to show a big improvement in performance. Toia also seems convinced that the camera handles mixed light and overexposure better.

In the video he talks about how his approach to post processing keeps things in the RED R3D Raw format right up to the last stage. Toia thinks that many common complaints about colour inaccuracy are the result of badly transcoding to another format too early in the post workflow, and not the fault of the RED sensor. He also claims that lenses, and not the camera, are having a bigger effect on the final image than other factors.

On the subject of resolution Toia says that he can’t easily tell the difference between the 5K, 6K and 8K images on screen. He sees the difference being more to do with other aspects of the image.

He also talks about how the increased resolution means that using the 35 megapixel images to grab stills for commercial work is now a reality – something that I’m sure many photographers will be interested to hear coming from someone who is used to shooting advertising stills.

Will 8K become the norm? It certainly seems that people like Toia are headed that way.