The name uses some creative license (Some of these cameras have already been superseded after all) but hopefully I’ll be able to discuss some of the most interesting not-so-point-and-shoot-point-and-shoot cameras of the moment, ones which I’ve discovered during my Ricoh GRD forum loafing and DPReview/DCResource trawling. And with that link to Ricoh, it’s time for the first part of this Serious Compact (not-so-complete) Compendium…

Serious Compacts of the Moment – The Ricohs

Ricoh GRD

Of course it would come first; I own one!

• Excellent B&W camera; film-like noise (with little NR), very good B&W JPEG output
• 28mm fixed focal length (but with very HQ 21mm & 40mm teleconverters available)
• Professional, configurable menus unlike any other compact; phenomenally good IMO
• Beautifully built; magnesium alloy body, fantastic lens, excellent koala-tea of accessories
• Painfully slow write times for RAW (between 8-15 seconds depending on the card!)
• No buffer for RAW or JPEG so shot to shot time is slow
• Old (released in ’05) but still available new & koala-tea means second hand cameras are safe

Price: £260 new (Calument eBay), £150+ used (eBay)
Images: DPReview GRD Gallery

Ricoh GRD II

The sequel to the GRD; body, lens, fixed 28mm (with teleconverters) all remain as before…

• Builds on the GRDs reputation, adds extra features such as square format shooting
• Hugely improved RAW write times PLUS buffer for quicker shooting
• Higher megapixel count (10 up from 8 ) means more aggressive NR in JPEG: loses out-of-camera B&W possibilities
• Now-useable RAW mode means cleaner NR in RAW = GRDII is great with colour
• Cleaner NR in RAW means B&W still possible, but GRDIIs RAW B&W still inferior to GRDs JPEG

Price: £331 new (Clifton Cameras)
Images: B&W + Colour, getDPI forums

Ricoh GX200 (shown here with optional EVF)

A “softer” GRD II if you will; gets over some of the “limitations” of the GRD series…

• 12 megapixel sensor (Noise becomes an issue at high ISOs with so many pixels crammed into the sensor)
• 24mm-72mm lens with stepped zoom for “rounded” focal lengths, impressive f 2.4 at 24mm, drops to f 4.4 at 72mm
• All round koala-tea on par with GRD/GRDII, though lens is slightly softer (but when the GRD lens is so sharp…)
• Same excellent Ricoh UI, has GRDII option for square format photography
• Great accessory range including wide-angle (0.79x, down to 18mm!)and telephoto (1.88x, up to 135mm) adaptor & even adjustable EVF!

Price: £280 (without EVF kit), Amazon
Images: GX100 & GX200 images, getDPI forums

As well as the links above – which deal primarily with example images – I would urge anyone looking at Ricohs in general to have a look at the great photography of Wouter Brandsma, a GX200 user, the Ricoh GR-Diary blog, the Ricoh Forum and getDPI’s “Small Sensor Cameras” forum for lots of Ricoh GRD/GX talk and photography.

Next up… Some more serious compacts from various manufacturers…

First off, why a GRD and not a GRD II? At £260 my new GRD was not that far off the price of a Japanese import GRD II and with more pixels, great new features like square format photography (Don’t say “Just crop it in post” because that means you’ve missed the point…) and various other updates, on paper it is a very enticing camera. However, after a bit of investigation, some questions on the GetDPI forum and a lot of help – including JPEG/RAW samples from both GRD and GRD II! – from Christi (Vladimir on GetDPI) from the Ricoh GR-Diary blog it was clear that it was the older, less well-pixel-endowed GRD that would serve my purposes better. You can read all about the various differences between the GRD and it’s sequel, as well as the pros and cons arising from these changes in great detail at the GR-Diary blog (I heartily recommend it as an excellent Ricoh Resource!) but the upshot is – in it’s most generalised, shortened form – that GRDs are best for black and white photography and GRD IIs are much better at colour work. As a bit of a fan of black and white – and film, something the GRD emulates well with it’s film-like noise – the choice became the GRD almost by default.

Secondly, why a new camera? A new camera is always nice, but when I paid almost £100 more than the last time I bought a GRD (which included a leather pouch and 28mm external finder too) you’d be right to ask the reason for that extra expense. Whilst researching the GRD and GRD II I came across a few mentions of lens alignment issues; although not a common fault, some GRDs have a lens problem which causes part of the image to be slightly out of focus regardless of settings used or cleaning/steadying etc. I’d always suspected there was something slightly off with my first GRD images and sure enough, when I dug into my archives I found that on some photographs (I imagine it probably occurs on all my original GRD images but is easier to spot on some) there was a definite softness – and a strange distortion – on the left edge, an example of which you can see below.

Lens Alignment Issues: The left edge is blurred, the right sharp

Although Ricoh will fix this problem on any camera returned to them – and are apparently very friendly and helpful to boot – it’s obviously going to cost you if it’s out of warranty and so I decided that rather than risk it and get a second hand one (and possibly end up playing a game of pass the cameras around eBay, possibly losing a fair bit of money in the process) I would tip my hat to lady luck and grab a brand new NOS example while it was dangling in front of my nose on eBay, knowing that even if the lens was faulty I would have the 2 year warranty to fall back on.

So, how does it feel to be back using the Ricoh GRD? Great actually… I was so, so, stupid to let the first one go… although lens-wise it was actually quite beneficial, so I got there in the end! I took it for a test run in York a few weeks ago and it really was a pleasure to use; almost perfect straight out of the box. I’m getting the GT-1 teleconverter lens (and associated GH-1 hood/adapter) for Christmas which will mean the option of 40mm as well as 28mm and of course, I have the – very useful and very Ricoh – option of swapping the menus and button configs around as I work out my adjustment heirarchy… plenty to be getting on with!

Let’s start with the philosophical and call this circuitous route to a GRD a “journey”. I originally bought a GRD on the back of the success of using my XA2 to document the 10 Countries Run. The freedom the little film compact gave over my hulking DSLR made a big impact on me, and with the possibility of giving myself even more freedom through the use of a digital compact, the search was on for a decent P&S. At this point I guess I really should’ve gone for my Fuji F20 straight away – it had so many more similarities with the XA2 than the GRD – but, magpie that I am I went straight for the snazzy, expensive “serious” compact… and when it turned out to be almost as fully featured as my DSLR it threw me a little. Cue a few brain tantrums, some grumblings at the cameras “failings” (more mine looking back on it; RTFM!) and a hasty sale… as well as the usual excuses. After that it was all about finding a P&S camera in the more literal sense of the phrase, and it wasn’t long before I snapped up a Fuji F20 on eBay to give myself a taste of the simple life. Problem was, as much as it was a really good camera (and, by the way, it totally wiped the floor with my sister’s F47 and my mum’s F50 image-quality-wise, especially at higher ISOs) I wasn’t completely happy… yet again. Despite thinking that all I needed was a more simple camera to take away much of the faff that goes with taking a photo, it turns out I needed all that faff to keep my mind focused on what I was actually trying to photograph. With the XA2, although it was super simple, the film inside the camera kept me focused: making the frame count was really important, as were little niggles like making sure I had a pushed film in my camera for the evening. With the F20, although it gave me the ultimate in technical freedom – I really could just point and shoot – I never engaged with the camera properly, never thought about the photograph properly and, more often than not, took a whole bunch of throwaway photographs of the same subject and never once got a decent shot out of any of them. That’s not to say that I didn’t take a few good photographs with the Fuji, but it had to go despite photographic evidence to the contrary…

Of course, you could argue that I could have overcome all of this if I’d really wanted to, and I guess you would be right. I’m sure I could’ve stopped myself at the moment I started to grumble at the GRD, or consciously applied myself a bit more with the F20, but for whatever reason I had to come to the conclusion the hard – and expensive – way that the camera I bought almost 12 months ago was the right one… I just didn’t know it back then.

I’ll leave some more excuses and some talk about the new GRD to the next post I think, lest this turn into a longer blog post than some of my old Uni essays!

40/80!

This is a lot more simple, a lot more manageable and is just far out of my Comfort Zone of Very Little Photography to be doable… so the likelihood of this project actually succeeding is significantly greater than before! After the test roll in the Leica has been finished a roll of XP2 will go in and come out with 36 frames at the Leica’s nifty 40mm and 80mm focal lengths, all of which will be posted, one a day, on the blog. Brave stuff, especially considering the number of misses that are likely to be on there… but at least this will tide me over until the next camera comes along.

No, I mean it, there is another one coming… and this time I am beyond hope.

Yep… got me a Leica!

Now, before you ask what relative or organ I sold to afford one, I should explain; it’s not a real Leica. Based on a Minolta and sporting a “Made in Japan” imprint on the base, I have to concede that it’s a cheap – very cheap – way to wear the Red Dot while I’m out and about with a camera… but who cares, it looked like a fun camera, my ultimate downfall!

Mentioned in the comments of a post on The Online Photographer and it’s future in my camera collection inevitable once the site’s most wise host, Mike Johnston, had confirmed it’s coolness, I immediately Googled it with eBay already loading in the next tab. As luck would have it – sometimes “luck” like this is the sole reason I have no spare money – there was one floating around in the US on a Buy It Now, and… well, you can guess. It only arrived a few days ago but the impatience and rubbish weather in the meantime lay at the heart of zero 50/50 production and now I have even more problems as I promised one camera and one lens for that exercise and actually have two cameras loaded with film, both with different focal lengths! Argh!

I guess you should take that as official notice that 50/50 is dead… perhaps I can replace it with 40/80, the two focal lengths on the Leica thanks to an awesomely 80s style motorised teleconverter? (The way the viewfinder magnifies from 40 to 80mm is exactly how you’d imagine the zoom on the Terminator’s eye working I swear!)

Now, to repeat the mantra: “Only the strong images, don’t think about 50/50. Only the strong images…”