Ricoh GR user review

After some time I managed to talk myself into buying this great little camera. I’ve had the GR for some months now and I want to sum up the good and bad parts for other potential buyers:

• This camera was made for photographers. Everything can be controlled and the buttons and dials are all in the right places. It feels solid and is so small you can take it everywhere. The battery is excelent and the camera can use regular AAA batteries if the regular battery runs out.
• It’s possible to shoot in 3:2. Personally I love this format. Voigtländer makes a viewfinder that fits the GR and gives you a 3:2 view of the world. I ordered mine from Adorama.
• The lens is excelent.
• Generally fast and userfriendly.
• Excelent infrared posibilities.
• RAW-writing times are slow, but this is not a big issue for me. Using a fast card and not choosing a big JPG to go with the RAW cuts down writing time. It’s still slow, but this is not an action camera. It’s fast to switch to JPG if you suddenly need faster writing speed (you can customize shortcuts for almost everything).
• Noise. This is the biggest problem with this camera. I can live with the general noise from the sensor. I shoot at ISO 64 all the time, so the noise is OK, but the camera quite often shows banding in the shadows. Sometimes this will show on prints. My solution is to add grain to break it up, or to pull down the shadows a little bit before printing (this looses som shadow detail).
• Underexposure. This camera delivers quite dark files. I wish the midle-tones where a little brighter. I think this is intentional to keep the highlights from blowing out. The strangest thing is that the histogram in live preview is lighther than when you review the same file after the shot!
• There is no shadow/highlight warning.
• Maximum one second in aperture mode. Longer times possible in manual mode.
• No viewfinder (optional).

Mostly I use the camera in aperture mode and over/underexpose when needed. I only shoot BW in RAW with a BW preview/JPG. I then convert to BW in Photoshop. The camera does a great job when shooting BW in dayligh. The bottom line is that this is a great poor-mans-Leica, perfect for outdoor and street-photography in BW.
If you want a regular point and shoot, get a camera for half the price of the GR and have fun.

If Ricoh upgrade this camera with a better sensor, faster RAW-speed and fine tune the exposure-curves, they have made the perfect camera. Until then I’m very pleased with the Ricoh GR mark one.

RAW exposure converted in Photoshop, ISO 64: