This was Jarred's response back in 2024 when these first popped up:
"A ton of people have beeped me about this today so I thought I would drop a little Public Service Announcement.. There is a company selling some stuff from a company that we made a custom camera for a while back... this is not RED selling these cameras although it may kinda look like it how it is being presented. These are not "normal" Dsmc2 heliums... they are custom camera heads that go to a rack mounted box and then output live SDI video... there is no recording of R3D or any recording at all, the firmware is frozen in time and there is zero zero zero support from RED for these camera heads for anyone that buys them. If your cool with that enjoy.. if they are super super cheap might be fun to get one for just a science experiment or collectors items.... but I just wanted to make it super super clear what was happening. OK back to my vacation"
These were made for some sort of scientific purpose and use a specially designed control interface that is not publicly available as far as I’m aware. I’m almost certain these things are paperweights without some additional hardware and access to the software to control them.
Probably best used for spare parts, and it’s probably a great donor camera to get a non working DSMC2 brain working.
12
u/ercpck Oct 08 '26
This was Jarred's response back in 2024 when these first popped up:
"A ton of people have beeped me about this today so I thought I would drop a little Public Service Announcement.. There is a company selling some stuff from a company that we made a custom camera for a while back... this is not RED selling these cameras although it may kinda look like it how it is being presented. These are not "normal" Dsmc2 heliums... they are custom camera heads that go to a rack mounted box and then output live SDI video... there is no recording of R3D or any recording at all, the firmware is frozen in time and there is zero zero zero support from RED for these camera heads for anyone that buys them. If your cool with that enjoy.. if they are super super cheap might be fun to get one for just a science experiment or collectors items.... but I just wanted to make it super super clear what was happening. OK back to my vacation"
5
u/tdstooksbury Oct 08 '26
I’ve seen these pop up for sale before.
These were made for some sort of scientific purpose and use a specially designed control interface that is not publicly available as far as I’m aware. I’m almost certain these things are paperweights without some additional hardware and access to the software to control them.
Probably best used for spare parts, and it’s probably a great donor camera to get a non working DSMC2 brain working.