My second Ricoh is actually a bit special as it’s a brand new one from Calumet Photo’s eBay shop – I’m guessing it’s a NOS example as the outer sleeve to the box was a bit scuffed and mussed but everything underneath was in perfect untouched condition. I managed to snap up one of the 3 remaining GRDs (at the time of writing they have just one left!) for £260, which might sound like a lot of money for a camera released in 2005, but as we shall see, there is method behind the madness…

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!