You can probably tell from the look of this page that I'm not one for flashy web pages though I do make money from images, mainly with my Canon digital SLR cameras. While I make money at it, I'm not a full-time pro photographer and I never have been. The photography I do for business is mainly architectural and social; it's houses and their environment and the people that live in them. For pleasure I take pictures of almost anything and for that I need something lighter, smaller and more unobtrusive than one of my SLRs.
So, since small digital cameras first appeared I've always had something small to carry around most of the time. Looking in my archive cupboard I see I have had an Olympus C2000Z (2.1mp) a Minolta XT (3.2mp) plus a Ricoh R2 (5mp) about to join them. But it's not only the small camera that I need to have in my pocket or on my belt all the time, it also has to act as a dictating machine and a portable photocopier.
Ricoh's R3 camera was announced in September 2005 and was reviewed only in a small handful of places on the web. You might ask why. Ricoh made film cameras and lenses for them from 1936 to 2002. They had their own rangefinder cameras along with Leica, Nikon, Contax, Zeiss and Canon. Their SLR cameras from 1964 to 2000 were made for Pentax K, M42, M29 and Nikon F mounts and their Rikenon lenses were made for the Pentax mounts, the M42 and M29 and Leica M mounts. Ricoh has a large range of digital cameras in production and as a company turns over $US 17 billion in imaging products with a 2006 estimate post-tax profit of $US 817 million. No small fry, then. But Ricoh does not sell its consumer digital cameras in the United States. That's mainly why the web reviewers don't bother. Anyway that's the reason Phil Askey gives for DPReview not including Ricoh in its review line-up. This modest offering attempts to address that omission.
If you have read a review of the Ricoh R3 (or have a Ricoh R3) and want to know the differences between the R3 and the R4 there are really very few. These are they:
What's unique about the Ricoh R4 (as of April 2006) is that it's the smallest (3.5 x 2 x 1 inch and weighing less than 6 ounces) camera with a zoom lens from 28 to 200 mm in 35 mm equivalent, an anti-shake system that works, a reasonable video mode, arguably the best macro performance in a small digicam, a dedicated text mode including a skew correction mode and an audio record mode that actually works like a digital voice recorder. The optical performance reflects Ricoh's 70 years in the camera business. Sounds too good to be true doesn't it?
The R4 is essentially a "point and shoot" camera. There is very little control over the shooting parameters and in particular you can't choose the aperture or shutter speed, although there is a little implicit control using the "scene" modes. Most users will just turn it on and use the default settings but here are the things you can adjust.
As well as these controls you have the choice of the "scene" modes. The standard ones are Portrait, Sports, Landscape, Nightscape which you will have met before. The special ones are: Skew Correction Mode which will straighten objects that are rectangular but viewed as trapezoidal because of the aspect and trim the shot to the straightened object; Text mode for shots of text in monochrome and where you can choose the saturation; Macro zoom which lets you get above 1:1 ratio but only by using the digital zoom function; high sensitivity mode which boosts the LCD brightness and raises the ISO. You also have the standard Macro mode which is a Ricoh speciality, allowing focus as close as 1 cm in wide-angle and 13 cm at max telephoto.
The ADJ button brings up four of the most useful menu options. Fixed ones are exposure compensation and white balance. The next two are user-defined from other menu options. I set these to ISO and Metering.
Although very small and without a viewfinder, I find the camera very easy to hold and use. The 2.5 inch TFT screen is reasonably clear in sunlight and it takes one hard press on the Display button to switch to and from maximum brightness. The display has the usual options for what you see displayed including the useful grid option. Zoom controls are quick to use. You can also set the zoom controls to jump in steps. This is supposed to be 28, 35, 50, 85, 105, 135 and 200 but the 85 is actually 75. On the R2 the zoom was slow and jerky but on the R4 it is smooth and fast so the steps are not required unless you want to set the focal length to a known value. The shutter button is responsive and it's worth using the preliminary half-press. What is exceptional is the startup speed and lack of shutter lag. I reckon the shutter is as fast as on my Canon 5D. One could therefore give the R4 high marks for handling.
The lens is optically surprisingly good. Not exceptional, mind, but better than one might expect. It resolves well at low ISO settings and has good contrast. The sensor does not do it any favours so you will get the best out of it in good light. It is definitely worth your while to shoot some tests using the sharpness and colour depth settings because the less you ask the camera's firmware to do the better the shot is likely to be and if you want to post-process it your computer software will do a better job than the firmware. I've used the personalised parameter settings to use ISO 64, soft sharpness and neutral colour depth for when I know I'm going to post-process a shot. Conversely you can also get good results with vivid colour and high sharpness.
At 28 mm the lens produces some barrel distortion. In scenes with sharply defined verticals and horizontals this is noticeable and it takes the application of 8% of the barrel distortion filter in Paint Shop Pro X to straighten it. This doesn't mean that there is 8% barrel distortion and in fact it's not a significant distortion. Past 35mm all is well until around 135 mm when a small amount of pincushion distortion creeps in but this disappears by 200 mm (which incidentally actually is 200 mm equivalent).
Auto focus seems to be good. It's difficult to tell because at wide angle the depth of field is very large anyway. It's more noticeably accurate at the longer focal lengths. I do tend to use spot focus and I'm quite content to set Infinity focus for landscapes. Although it exists in macro mode, there's no method of moving the spot focus area from the centre, so to focus on one area and centre the shot on another you have to lock focus by half-pressing the shutter button and then recompose the shot.
I've some misgivings over the R4's multi-zone metering. It may well be me as I always have problems with metering on point and shoot cameras unless it's partial or spot. My own opinion is that the R4 doesn't always get multi-zone metering right and blown highlights can occur. Not so with partial metering, though, and spot metering is pretty good especially if you lay off a bit with exposure compensation for blacks and whites. You can't lock metering and recompose (or if you can, I've not found out how to).
Before looking at the important question of image quality in still images, I would like to get two not-so-good bits of the R4 out of the way. The first is that the flash performance of the R4 is a bit below average. The flash is not strong and there is no option for flash exposure control. It does work, though, and you can take a flash photograph in complete darkness. The second is the video performance. I think it is reasonable if you want to use it (which I don't) but it is certainly less well specified than its competitors.
You buy a camera for all sorts of reasons but one of them definitely has to be image quality and the ability to print or have printed your shots at least at postcard size without having to resort to processing the images yourself before they are printed. With the R4 and also with all other digital camera with 1/2.5" sensors and 5 megapixels or more there is a general problem with NOISE. I would like to try to explain this because often a reviewer can miss the point. The R3 sensor is the same size as the R4 sensor but with 17% fewer photosites and of the R3 the reviewer on PhotographyBLOG said - "The Ricoh Caplio R3 is one of the most usable, intuitive and well-designed digital cameras that I have ever reviewed, but at the same time, however, the images that it produces are some of the worst that I have seen." Well, the R4's sensor is at least the equal with regard to definition and noise than the one in the R3 in spite of having an additional 1 million pixels so we can compare them as like with like.
Noise in files produced by digital cameras is two distinct types. First you have luminance noise which is very similar in appearance to the grain that appears in prints from some "fast" film. This is like granules of the same, or close to the same, colour and texture but separated and not a block of constant colour. Hence "grain". Second there is chrominance noise (sometimes called chroma noise but which we will call colour noise). This colour noise (which is a purely digital phenomenon) appears as tiny blocks of the wrong colour (typically blue within black or red within green) in shadows or even in the well-exposed part of the image. Of the two, colour noise is the most destructive and can be made worse by the camera's firmware sharpening the image. I personally think that "grain" has its place in images and that it's often a shame to remove it, but colour noise is something that we can all do without.
One marvellous thing that digital cameras give us is the ability to change the speed of the "film" for each shot. With a film camera you loaded a film with the speed you wanted and were stuck with it. That's why so many film photographers use more than one camera body (or more than one film back if the camera takes alternative film backs). Film "speed" is measured in ISO ratings and these generally are 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and 3200 where each increment means that you can assume that the sensitivity is 100% higher than the previous one. The R4 has ISO speeds of 64, 100, 200, 400 and 800. It also has an Auto ISO setting that will select an ISO speed between 64 and 200 when not in flash mode and will add 400 to the range when in flash mode. With film, using a high ISO speed one increases the grain and it's much the same with digital cameras.
But why do small digicams produce such noisy images? The 1/2.5" sensor is tiny, only 5.7 mm by 4.3 mm, and In the R4 it's got about 6.2 million photosites that receive light that is eventually processed into a picture. Compare that to a digital SLR like the Canon 5D that has a sensor 24 mm by 36 mm - that's 35 times larger - with only twice the number of photosites. In the 5D the pixels are bigger, much bigger. Bigger pixels means that each one can contain more information. So while I can use my Canon 5D at ISO 1600 and get relatively noise-free shots, one can't rely on the R4 producing good prints "out-of-the-box" at an ISO higher than 200 - and that's three times less light. The reason is that as the ISO increases or the light gets dimmer the camera has to "turn up the gain" on the sensor and the basic noise level increases. As this happens, for small pixels, some of the signal part cannot be collected. The result is that the signal to noise ratio is low and thus the image contains more noise than is acceptable. The firmware in each brand of digital camera handles this noise in a different way and many (if not most) of them use noise abatement techniques to present a smoother image. The problem is that when noise is reduced so is definition. Some manufacturers apply aggressive noise control that cannot be undone later. Ricoh is one of the manufacturers (Panasonic is another) not to deal aggressively with the noise and let a substantial amount of it through, together with the definition, for the user to be able to handle in post processing.
In an attempt to measure the noise realistically I did a morning's shooting in London's Notting Hill, mainly shoppers and shops both exterior and interior shots. It was a bright cloudy day (about 1/200th at f3.3 at ISO 100, say EV 11). I printed a selection, using QImage with no additional sharpening, at 6" x 4" and 7" x 5.25" on a Canon i9950 printer. With the external shots what I found was that at ISO 64 and 100 there was no visible luminance or colour noise in the prints at normal viewing distance. At ISO 100 and the larger print size, using a magnifier revealed a little luminance noise in darker areas. At ISO 200 an amount of grain was visible in the smaller print size, but no more than a print off ISO 400 colour negative film, and it was more noticeable in the larger print size together with colour noise just starting to appear when viewed under the magnifier. The internal shots varied enormously depending on light levels, but there was luminance noise in shadows clearly visible in the larger print size from ISO 100 upwards to 200. Generally acceptable, I thought, although one or two could do with some cleaning up. At lunch at Julie's Bar at Clarendon Cross (go there if you are in the vicinity) I took a few internal shots at 1/8th and ISO 400 at f3.3. These were extremely noisy but did clean up quite well later. Later I was around the British Museum and took three shots of this at ISO 200, 400 and 800. You'll find all these shots on the pictures page. I think my greatest disappointment with the R4 (but remember, I'm spoilt by having two Canon full-frame digital SLRs with lenses to match) is grain in shadows which illustrates the rather narrow dynamic range of the sensors in small digicams. [Just by the way, for some time shooting in the street, outside and inside shops, in a restaurant, an art gallery and around the fashionable retail area I only got told to put the camera away once. The little R4 is pretty discreet. If I had had the Canon 1DsII plus 70-200 lens I'm sure I would have been stopped many times more.]
So the enthusiastic R4 user will have to post-process to clean up noise. The cheapest option is Photoshop Elements and the next more expensive option is Paint Shop Pro X. Both of these contain their own noise-handling routines which may be adequate. The most effective and best known anti-noise utilities are Neat Image and Noise Ninja. Each of these has its own strengths but I think that Noise Ninja handles colour noise better. Curing your noise problem with either of these will cost about US$50 for a licence for the standalone version or slightly more if you want to have a Photoshop Plugin in the package. I've found that shooting with the Ricoh R4 even at ISO 800 it is possible to get an acceptable image after processing it with Noise Ninja. This does rather "flatten" the image and give slight a "water-colour" effect but it's certainly better than heavy in-camera noise control and you can of course fine-tune it if you need to.
So how to conclude and recommend? Well, plainly I'm using the camera so for me it has a high score. All its features put it in front of the other contenders and before I bought the R4, the R2 did the same job for me. I do use the text modes and the voice recorder a lot and because I'm using the camera to record visual information I often use the ability to attach a voice clip to a shot. But to recommend it to others? If you don't need the 24 mm wide angle or the long end of the zoom there are plenty of 35-105 mm zoom small digicams. If you don't need it to be small, there are other cameras with less noisy output because they have larger sensors. If you want the best video mode then you can ignore the Ricoh range. I think a more independent reviewer will pay more attention to what he sees in 100% crops of studio shots, compare these to a similar camera with greater noise control, throw up his/her hands in horror and mark it down to 74% or so. Another reviewer that does not use a consistent comparison may note the noisy shots at higher ISO and still give a score around 90%. When it comes to percent scores or "stars", I'm in favour of the Michelin restaurant guide system. They give knife-and-fork symbols for luxury, comfort, ambience and relative culinary skill (from 1 to 5) and then stars for cooking. But the stars are relative to the knife-and-fork range so that you can have a restaurant that could have two stars and only one knife-and-fork but if that restaurant had four knife-and-forks perhaps it would not even get a star. So on the basis that I am marking the class of camera that is easily pocketable, has a 1/2.5" sensor and between 5 and 6 megapixels I'm going to give the Ricoh R4 91%
April 2006
You can see some of the shots at http://www.flickr.com/photos/22753507@N00/sets/72057594113160813/