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Average user rating:
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Full user review
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4.5 stars
"Ricoh GR Compact is a good tool"
Pros: Small, tough, high quality lens, faithful colour
Cons: Adapter assembly is fiddly, wont take 4GB SD cards
Summary: When I read the review here about the Ricoh compact, I must admit it felt as though I was reading a review of an entirely different camera to the one I bought.
I think this camera is a rather specialist tool which needs to be handled properly to appreciate just how capable it is.
It is designed to appeal to the street and landscape photographer, and really not intended to be a quick and easy point and shoot for churning out JPEGS whilst capturing birthday and Xmas party shots.
The Ricoh GRD range of cameras really come into their own with photographers who prefer to use RAW format, and eschew the lure of zoom lenses.
Having a fixed lens makes the photographer think about what he or she is taking a photograph of, walking to or from a subject to capture it rather than having the ease of use of a zoom lens, makes every shot count as the temptation to capture image after image at a range of focal lengths while 'zooming' is removed.
I think the reviewer must have received a faulty camera to review as the lens fitted to my Ricoh fixed lens GR compact camera is pin sharp - when used at its optimum apertures.
Shooting at the maximum aperture of f2.4 will not do justice to the lens fitted, or for that matter any lenses fitted to any camera, the Ricoh 28mm fixed focal length lens performs best around f5.6 to f6.3.
Regarding colour fidelity, JPEGS are notably varied from camera make to camera make, for those who look for control over colour, and increased tonal range, RAW format is the only real alternative to opt for in digital photography at this time.
Raw images can be as colourful or as 'flat' as you desire because RAW format (often referred to as digital negative format) does not suffer from post processing as JPEGS do. Instead, the photographer decides what he or she wants to see when editing their images.
Finally, on matters concerning image noise, the Ricoh is comparatively poor to many other digital cameras, because its digital sensor size is really quite small when compared to that found on other 'serious' cameras.
The high sensititivy modes afforded by the Ricoh are at best to be regarded as 'emergency' settings. Capturing images at ISO64 is really the only way to get the best quality. However, RAW images at any ISO setting from Ricoh GRD cameras are unprocessed and thus retain maximum sharpness - the effects of image noise (when unprocessed in camera) are quite pleasing insomuch as they resemble 'film grain'.
Many people using these camers 'on the street', have found that setting their camera to black and white mode and ISO 400 or 800 produce images extremely akin to that achieved from TRI-X or HP5 film in conventional silver halogen based photography in the days prior to digital.
The Ricoh GRD fixed lens compacts (wether you opt for the earlier 8MP version or today's 10MP version), should be regarded as specialist miniature cameras which are capable of producing exceptional results when care is taken in their use. Their high cost is probably partly due to their being produced in relatively small quantities for a specialised market.
Ricoh GR Digital II:
