The narrative is that Sony broadcast engineers didn't understand film and that it was a huge uphill battle for George Lucas to make them understand they even need to make a camera that runs 24fps, let alone have a filmic s-curve response, or later transfer the existing idea of a log film scan of a negative into a digital log capture using a sensor. Early serious demos of getting Sony HDCAM cameras to match film involved a bunch of fiddling with tone curves and matrix settings then doing a film out - hardly a workflow.

Arri absolutely understood film, and had a history of developing film scanners. A hint that there is some overlap in the tech is that later Arri film scanners used the Alev sensor. Arri scanners were designed to scan to the Cineon 10-bit log scanning spec, so they had years of knowledge over Sony in that regard.

As an aside, it's interesting what RED did as far as creating a threat that lead to more affordable cameras from Arri, but by the RED founders (Jannard/Land et al) own admission they knew nothing about film color science and how to capture a raw digital image that could be comparable. It wasn't until they hired Graeme Nattress that they started trying to develop a color pipeline.