While the Viper, in this original MK1 guise, is now getting old, and there is a lot more competition in the market now, it is still a good camera and worthy of its status as the industries first real 'Digital Cinematography' camera.

In short, Viper has been a good Digital Cinematography camera, as in FilmStream mode next to nothing is done to the image; what the lens sees is what the camera delivers. Every Pixel is there in full resolution.

This gives you the freedom to create a look in post that matches your artistic vision and the confidence that it will capture that vision faithfully and perfectly.

There is no irreversible camera processing such as gamma, knee, contouring, white balance, or clipping.

From this stream of digital data DI systems, such as the Quantel iQ Pablo, has a full resolution, and more importantly, full dynamic range image with which to work.

Additionally, the camera's ability to shoot native 3.25 without anamorphic lenses is a great bonus for cinematography projects, as can be seen with the Les Absintheurs images.

The Viper camera can also be used underwater and in helicopter mounts. We know, we've done it with our clients!

To see Viper being used on a real film project, please look at the images taken on-set of 'SBY'

However, it has to be said that while Viper has proven to be one of the best cameras available, the introduction of newer Digital Cinematography cameras, especially the RED camera, are again raising the bar for Digital Cinematography.

We have also discovered a fairly major flaw with the Viper, in that when shooting high contrast images, with bright highlights against a dark background, a form of 'ringing' will occur to the right of the highlight. This artefact has to be removed in post, which can be a time consuming process. The following images, which have been zoomed to 200% via 'nearest neighbor' pixel duplication, show the problem.

An example of the 'ringing' that occurs on Viper Images.

And the image after post correction of the ringing.

Out of interest, when the full frame was post corrected, of which the above image is a part, the correction software reported 2867 error pixels that required correction...

For those of you working with Viper images in post, the software used to to remove the 'ringing' above can be downloaded here.

This is Thomson provided software, but they seem to not be advertising its existance too well...

Hopefully the rumored Viper MK2 will deal with this problem in-camera!