With the mobile professional in mind
Still, the RDC-i700 will certainly be of interest to real estate agents, property managers, law enforcement officers, insurance companies, and anyone else who wants to send images remotely. Spies will especially appreciate the camera's binary-text capture mode, allowing them to take shots of paper documents in black and white, which occupy minimal storage space and are faster to transmit. Both the documents and the pictures can be sent as e-mail attachments or forwarded directly to a fax machine via the network connection.
In order to use this camera wirelessly, you will need to subscribe to a wireless service. We recommend Ricochet if you live within its limited coverage area, both because of its high bandwidth and its straightforward, all-you-can-eat pricing plan. Currently, there is no support for 802.11b or Bluetooth cards, but Ricoh is about to release an OS upgrade for its RDC-i700 with support for Sprint's CDMA modem, the AirCard 510. Ricoh is also teaming up with ActivePhoto, a Web-based service that stores, backs up, and helps you manage your image archive.
Polaroid gave us the instant picture. With the RDC-i700, Ricoh brings the same notion of instantaneous imaging into the digital age. Snap a shot and place it instantly in your desktop archive. The camera's high price tag ($1,299) and the added cost of mobile services will place the RDC-i700 out of the reach of most consumers, but for many field workers, it will be worth considering.
| Jury results: image quality Results based on a poll of CNET staff, who rate image quality on a scale of 1 to 10; longer bars equal better performance.
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| The Ricoh RDC-i700 produced colorful, sharp images both indoors and out. However, the shots we took outdoors showed consistently better white-balance compensation and outshined by far our indoor results. |
What You'll Pay
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