the original cowboys of big budget digital cinema. David Fincher & Harris Savides striving for a crisp, rich, and relatively clean image, with a workflow that allowed them near unlimited takes to achieve ZODIAC. Michael Mann with Dion Beebe, and Paul Cameron (who left 3 weeks into filming) embraced the chaos of low light sensitivity far beyond what the sensors were even capable of back then - which lead to a look nobody had ever really seen before with COLLATERAL. Mann used the Thomson Viper FilmStream which had a 2/3" 2MP sensor for a 10 bit 1080p image. It was the first film to shoot primarily on the Viper (in conjunction with the SONY F900 and a scene on 35mm film) Fincher also used the FilmStream entirely for Zodiac - except for a high speed sequence that was over-cranked 35mm. Digital cinema cameras back then were HUGE complicated monsters with convoluted image pipelines, clunky workflows, and generally speaking fairly basic image quality by today's standards... but Mann & Fincher both along with their amazing crews were able to squeeze some really beautiful pixels out of the tech. They both made films that hold up today and in many respects they look a hell of a lot better than a lot of modern digitally shot films and TV.