Showdown at Big Sky

R0000171RICOH GR (18.3mm, f/3.2, 1/125 sec, ISO100)

If you don’t plan to take any pictures you don’t bring a camera. There is still a camera in your smartphone. Today small sensor compact cameras are hardly any better than the camera inside a smartphone. As a consequence a lot of photos are taken with phones.

I never took my Fuji XP1 or my Fuji X100 with me just in case I might take an image. I got a Sony RX100, loved the image quality but didn’t like the handling. It never felt like a real camera to me. As a consequence I did not take it with me all the time and missed a lot of shots.

For a gear head like me there was only one logical answer: I’m in need of another camera! A very compact camera with a big sensor that is a joy to use. Today there is only one camera that ticks all these boxes: The Ricoh GR!

A very small camera with a 2.8/28mm ( equivalent ) prime lens and an APS-C sized sensor. The sensor has 16MP and there is no low pass filter. As a result image quality should be very good. When I saw the announcement I knew that this was the camera I was waiting for. I didn’t care about the zoom lens on the RX100. The zoom was slow and IS ineffective. I used the lens on it’s widest setting almost all the time.

The company that most of us know for building office printers has created some wonderful cameras under the GR name back in the days of film. They continued to do so with digital cameras. Fast, high quality compacts. Now with the newest version they finally put a real big sensor in a GR to create the smallest camera with an APS-C sized sensor.

I just got it a couple of days ago and managed to take the image above just because I had a real camera with me. Sure I could have taken the image with my iPhone but I think the result would have been different.

And there is a extremely good looking out of camera BW:

R0000162RICOH GR (18.3mm, f/2.8, 1/125 sec, ISO100)
R0000163RICOH GR (18.3mm, f/5, 1/125 sec, ISO125)