Jim Jannard, founder of RED Digital Cinema Camera Company and Oakley, Inc. has announced that he will be retiring from his 45-year long career due to health issues. Along with his career, he is also retiring the Hydrogen Project which was RED attempt at creating a flagship smartphone camera, which proved to be unsuccessful.
In a post, Jim Jannard said that he will be ‘shutting down the HYDROGEN project’ but the Hydrogen One, the projects first smartphone, will continue to be supported in the future. The post does mean that the Hydrogen Two, that was announced back in July, is effectively dead now. The newly teased new cinema module/sensor dubbed Komodo is still on track to be released soon. Jim Jannard had earlier posted more news about a list of things that the module will not be but nothing more.
The Hydrogen One was a much hyped phone that was released in 2018 with features. But the phone proved to be an unfinished mess of product that was not expected from RED, considering its history of high quality products. RED promised that Hydrogen Two will be a much better phone but, with the Hydrogen Project ended, it looks like the phone will never come out to consumers.