During a livestream a couple of years ago with some of the very first filmmakers to get their hands on the RED Komodo, Jarred Land announced that a monochrome Komodo was absolutely on the road map. Now that the V-Raptor, V-Raptor XL and Rhino are all in production, can we expect a Komodochrome in 2023?
“There definitely will be a monochrome Komodo after we’ve caught up with everything. Which is great because I love, I mean monochrome, we made, again another David Fincher – that was where that all started with. But, you know, it’s super expensive just to make one wafer of monochrome because it’s actually a new wafer: we have to take the color filters off or don’t put them on there. It’s great when we did that with the Scarlet. If you remember, we made a monochrome Scarlet, so it was a little bit affordable, because you’d have to be a complete maniac to spend $50 thousand dollars on a monochrome camera – and I know some of you did, thank you very much! But, I spent a lot more. But making this Komodo, to have this little six thousand dollar super awesome monochrome camera… Again, if you look at it like an auxilliary camera, I think I’m really, really going to love that. What a lot of people don’t understand… you can get pretty awesome images desaturating, using LUTs and filters to get monochrome out of color, we all know that. But when you have a monochrome sensor and you take off the color filters you’re actually giving that sensor double the light so your sensitivity doubles and then every pixel, instead of combining colors to get a pixel, every single pixel is… you still get the same resolution but your inherent resolution goes so much higher because you’re getting like a macro resolution where you’ve got three or four pixels… you’re getting image data instead of combining and averaging them to get one… I think we were the first cinema camera to really do that. I think ARRI makes one now… I don’t know if Canon ever did… Fincher just shot his entire movie in monochrome, so there are people up there who get it and love it and there certainly are a lot of great applications for it.” – Jarred Land, president, RED Digital Cinema
Update 18.02.2023: Jarred Land has announced the Komodo Monochrome. Read about it here.
The Daejeon Chronicles 
Leave a Reply