Holographic Camera

The Red Hydrogen One: What Good Is a Holographic Camera Anyway?

This phone is gallantly strange, but not exactly great. 

By Sam Blum
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The Hydrogen One, the first smartphone by the camera-maker Red, makes little attempt to imitate the iPhones and Pixels of the world. It's big, heavy, and sturdy—Kevlar and aluminum—almost in defiance of its sleek competitors.


With its giant camera bump smack in the middle of its back, the Hydrogen One doesn't mask what it intends to be good at. This is a phone for photos and videos—in 3D. But to what end?


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The Hydrogen One can take "3D" photos and video, enabled by what Red calls a "4-View QHD halographic screen." What that actually means is the device's front-facing camera (and only its front-facing camera) can toggle between 2D and 3D settings, with a brief pause while it changes modes as if it were shifting gears. The result is something that feels more like a magic trick than science fiction. When the 3D kicks in, the screen's quality takes on a shimmery sort of filter, making the subject look like they're being reflected in a pond, or being displayed by an action figure from the 80s.

The 4-View feature is meant to add depth to photos, and to some extent, it works. But the extra depth comes at the expense of quality: My 3D photos looked blurrier than my normal ones, which made me less than enthusiastic to keep toying with one of the phone's main selling points.

There's more to do than just look at your own 3D selfies, though. Red bills its phone as the world's first "halographic media machine," suggesting it's the harbinger of a whole new content form. Right now, though, that form barely exists, and the only holographic content available are little clips and demos from the Hydrogen Media store. They are fun for a few minutes, at most.


A sampling of roughly half of the available 3D content for you to watch.
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Red plans to release a mount for the phone, allowing you to attach lenses from a digital camera—a nice way to incorporate some of your favorite photo gear. Unfortunately, Red is still tinkering with the tech, which won't be available until next year. Even if you're interested in that very niche-use-case, your best bet is to wait and see how the whole experiment shakes out.

Hydrogen One is novel. As Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei, HTC, and company are locked in a bid to best each other with similar-looking and similar-performing phones, Red unveiled a black Kevlar brick of a phone. You could probably take it rock climbing and not have to worry about it breaking. And the hulking beast's 4,500-mAh battery gives it a battery life that crushes most of the competition.

But it's hard to recommend the Hydrogen One, at least not before its lens gimmick shakes out, if for no other reason than its outrageous price. At $1,295 for the cheapest model, it's ludicrously expensive even compared to the iPhone XS or Pixel 3, which boast better cameras and a smoother, more reliable software experience. And that's not even mentioning the titanium version which will cost a whopping $1,595 upon the phone's release on November 2.

As such, unless the lens-mount system is a real game-changer, the Hydrogen One seems most likely to wind up with the Palm, a 3.3-inch device earlier this month, and Andy Rubin's Essential Phone, which are likely to flop and have flopped, respectively. If the Hydrogen One does go down the same path, at least it will do it in bravely weird style.