Thought you guys might be interested in this one...

It was $110,000 when it came out I think about 15 years ago. Now it is $2,400.

Uncompressed 10-bit 4:4:4, I know there are some here who are looking for that ;)
 
Some of these older cameras have a cool look to their footage. I’ll occasionally use a higher end old camera for retro stuff. I’m not typically into vhs level quality. Just doesn’t blow up well on large digital TV’s imho, too many up res artifacts. The Viper has a good look. I think the jamie fox/tom cruise movie ‘Collateral’ was largely shot on Vipers and F900. The car scenes were Viper, i think? Someone else know?

As much as i like Minidv and vhs as an idea, i’d probably shoot on a F900 or Viper for most retro video, as it blows up better, less artifacts, then if needed smear/blur to downres but keep in 1080 or go up to 4K. That way, it has the vibe, without the extra stuff we never saw back then because of crt standard def tv’s.

There was a project i was replicating old video for, and i bought a standard def video camera thinking i’d get this wonderful blurry analogue impressionistic look, but was shocked by all the artifacts from blowing up a digital conversion of standard def capture. Maybe if the digital recorder can over sample the analogue feed, but my recorder recognized the SD feed, and recorded 480.
 
Really cool find. People, especially younger ones, just don't understand how expensive professional video gear used to be. I hear folks whine about the cost of newly introduced cameras and just laugh.
 
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Cool. For 2/3 I would prefer viper over F900, F23 etc. It had many better looking movies. I think best looking 2/3 movies were viper. But glad I have F35. :)
 
SJX said:
Cool. For 2/3 I would prefer viper over F900, F23 etc. It had many better looking movies. I think best looking 2/3 movies were viper. But glad I have F35. :)
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I think we only come to that conclusion because Viper had a longer street life than F23 without any direct competitors.. F23 was released and not 11 months later F35 came out and stole the show... if we had more time alone with the F23, I feel we would have seen things the viper could not have given talented DPs.
 
I think Miami Vice may have used the Viper, too.

I do remember not particularly liking night stuff done with the Viper, even back then.

I never used the Viper itself, but shot a ton with the normal Live/OB version(body is a carbon copy) and I hope the Viper had a better VF, because the Grass Valley VF's we used on the live side sucked and were constantly craping out.
 
Mark Williams said:
Really cool find. People, especially younger ones, just don't understand how expensive professional video gear used to be. I hear folks whine about the cost of newly introduced cameras and just laugh.
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Yes, we are in different times now, but I do laugh, too, when I see people complaining about a $2K camera costing "too much". It's like, dude, look what you get for that today! My first HD camera(720P) was $45K and you're complaining about spending $2k for a 6K large sensor camera that can shoot log and RAW and edit on your $900 laptop sitting at Starbucks instead of ingesting with a $20K tape deck into a $50K-$100K non-linear edit system "back at the ranch".
 
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