Last week we learned that RED, a company best known for making high-quality digital cinema cameras, is going to dip into the smartphone market with something called the Hydrogen One. The company announced the phone with a screaming hot price tag of $1,195 and up, but revealed little else aside from a few things: it will offer 3D (and “4D”) visuals and audio that will “ASSAULT YOUR SENSES,” the phone will be carrier-unlocked and run Android, and it will be modular.
Studying a patent application that RED submitted for a “Modular Digital Camera and Cellular Phone,” we can get a sense of just how modular the company’s thinking. But if you thought the phone alone was crazy, buckle up. In the pending patent, RED imagines a smartphone like the Hydrogen One as the starting point of a modular camera system that can swap everything from the screen to the lenses to additional accessories.
The application gives us an idea just how modular RED wants the phone to be
Within the phone-focused parts of the patent application, RED actually isn’t working in terribly different territory from other companies that make modular phones. The company imagines a few practical modules that will connect to the Hydrogen One, like a spare battery, a speaker, or a projector. The difference between these and similar efforts like the Moto Z phones is that, in RED’s version, all these modules are the same shape. You’d essentially be stacking another version of the Hydrogen One’s rectangular shape to the back or front of the phone.
An exploded view of RED’s smartphone attached to a camera module and a battery module.
RED goes on to describe other rectangular add-ons, though, like an entirely separate camera module, which itself has a modular lens system. The user would attach this camera module to the back of the Hydrogen One smartphone, therefore covering up its rear camera, but replacing it with one that uses a better image sensor and image processor to capture video at up to (or even over) 8K resolution. This camera module could use CMOS, CCD, or even FOVEON sensors, and range from half-inch to full-frame or bigger in size. The user could also put other modules in between the smartphone and the camera module, like a battery, or extra hard drives, for instance. And that’s where things get weird.