With Hollywood currently undergoing a transition from using film to digital to shoot their movies, it was only a matter of time before the technology started filtering down to the everyman, namely indie film makers.

While it could be argued that indie film makers indeed started the digital revolution (which, to be fair, they sort of did), the technology required to shoot films able to be shown in theatres or any form of large scale screen just hasn’t been cheap enough for anyone other than the likes of Peter Jackson to consider seriously.

With the National Association of Broadcasters (otherwise known as NAB) Show 2012 kicking off in Las Vegas recently, there’s been a raft of news from all the top camera manufactures, with most of them announcing the introduction of a cheap, portable and – relatively – easy to use professional digital video camera.

As mentioned above, these sorts of cameras have been around for a while – the likes of the Canon 5D Mark II have seen huge success, with the creators of House even shooting a scene on one – but cameras capable of producing content worthy of a Hollywood studios name have been horrendously expensive: RED’s EPIC (which Peter Jackson is using 48 of) costs around $60,000 per basic unit, with lenses and all sorts of other accessories needed to make it a functioning production camera.

But NAB has ushered in the 4K revolution.

4K video, when broken down into it’s resolution, is 4,096×2,048, or 4 times the amount of pixels we currently see on our HDTVs and BluRays. This results in a massive boost in quality, which is now close to the hands of all amateur film makers, by means of the Canon EOS-1D C. Coming later this year, the 1D C is a variant of Canon’s flagship professional camera body, the 1D X, but skewed more towards the video market. It hopes to bring the quality and features of more professional models (like the RED or Canon’s new C500), but at a fraction of the cost, with a suggested retail price of $12,000.