rr660 | sample images
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Details at a glance
Megapixels: 6.16
Optical Zoom: 3x
Digital Zoom: 4x
LCD screen: 2.4 inch
Storage: SD (16mb int)
Size: 87 x 25.5 x 60mm
Weight: 130g
(full details at bottom of the page)
We clicked with
Price, simplicity, AA batteries so you can get a replacement anywhere
Shots in the dark
Poor at low light shots, very slow response when using flash, limit of 200 ISO
Links
More Ricoh information
www.ricoh.com
Price Comparison:
Ricoh Caplio RR660
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Ricoh breaks new ground again with a pocket size camera packing 6 million pixels into a credit card sized body - and all for less than £130. Surely something has to give. You can't get superb quality in a small camera at this kind of price - can you?
Features
Features on compact cameras are getting out of hand. People are now expecting 85 different scene modes (even though few people use them), anti shake, Bluetooth, 80 fps movie modes etc... Given the price of the RR660 and the target market, it will come as no real surprise that it lacks many of these. There are modes for portraits, landscapes, action, close ups and night portraits as well as a movie mode that will record about an hour and a quarter's worth of web quality video onto a 1GB memory chip. More expensive cameras may offer more but really I doubt if you'll find a scene mode that you need that isn't available.
There is a 3X zoom that runs from 5.5 - 16.5mm - in “normal” terms (i.e. compared to a 35mm film camera) that's roughly equivalent to 35ish to 100ish mm. Not a huge zoom but a useful one going from moderately wide angle to moderate telephoto.
Handling
This is by no means a big camera. Length and width are pretty standard and are roughly that of a credit card. This is a common for factor for compact cameras - small enough to fit in a pocket but large enough for people with average size hands. The rr660 is thicker than some cameras, something over an inch from front to back and you may find it just a little chunky for a jeans pocket. It will easily fit in a jacket pocket.
The buttons on the back are well laid out and have a decent separation. Too often we see tiny cameras with impossibly small buttons but the rr660 should be usable by anyone with average or small size hands.
On the top there's a mechanical dial that allows you to select the various scene modes. If you read a lot of ThinkCamera reviews, you will know that we like mechanical dials. They are quick and easy to use and you can see at a glance which mode you are using.
One slightly odd handling characteristic is the menu system. If you are in auto mode and press the menu button, it appears that you can only change the image size and quality. However, place the camera in another mode, such as program, and you have full control over ISO, white balance, metering system etc. Turn the dial to “movie mode” and again the menus change so that you only see the appropriate options. A little strange if you are in auto mode and trying to change the ISO but once you realise what's going on it simplifies the whole process by not showing you options that you can't change. There's also a set up “mode” on the top dial that allows you to set rarely changed options such as time and date and USB mode. Again it's nice to see these removed from the menus you might use every day.
Image quality
In the right conditions, the Ricoh Caplio rr660 is capable of decent snapshots. Give it bright light and a scene without too much tonal range and the 6 million pixel sensor will give you some nice pictures which will easily enlarge to A4 - possibly larger. If you intend to take pictures in sunny climes, perhaps memories of a beach holiday, then the rr660 will serve you well.
When the lights go down, you can see how Ricoh have managed to deliver this camera at this price point. Even at ISO 100 the camera exhibits a lot of noise both in shadow areas and skin tones. It is limited to ISO 200 and it's easy to see why - at 200 images are very noisy (as bad as ISO 800 on some cameras that cost twice as much) and if the light is low then you might even struggle to get acceptable 6X4s because of the noise.
There's an onboard flash but as with most compacts this is pretty brutal. It's effective up to about 10 feet and is adequate for party pictures but of course will give you pretty harsh shadows.
The pictures also seem a little too yellow to my eye. Pure yellow flowers came out a little oversaturated and even some skin tones had a yellowish hue to them. I would recommend turning down the saturation on this camera to give the most natural colours.
Point the camera at a high contrast subject and you are likely to experience colour banding on the edges. This is chromatic aberration and shows itself as purple edges to, for example, dark leaves against a bright sky. This isn't the worst camera I've seen for this but purple fringing is pretty obvious at 100% so if you want biggish prints you'll need to take care with high contrast scenes.
Overall on the default settings I found the images a little too contrasty and oversharpened for my taste. These are tuneable in program mode and they aren't so bad that a mini lab wouldn't make a decent print of them.
Shooting
The rr660 takes a leisurely 5 seconds or so to power up. This camera is built for price rather than speed and it's no surprise that the shot to shot time isn't that great. There is no burst mode.
As you might expect, shutter lag is an issue on this camera. Trying to photograph children on swings I was getting a lot more misses that hits. Even when I learnt to release a little early it was still very much a matter chance if I got a well framed shot or not.
Turn on the flash and response becomes extremely slow. Press the shutter button and a second or two later the flash fire, then a pause and it fires again. The shot is taken on the second flash. This causes you to miss shots in two ways. Firstly the time between pressing the shutter and the camera taking a picture is long - forget about action shots with flash. Secondly the first flash not only alerts the subject (and often causes them to blink in time for the second flash), until you are used to it it's very tempting to move the camera after the first flash making you miss the shot entirely. All in all I found the flash extremely hard to use for anything other than static subjects.
Suitable for...
The remarks on image quality and handling should have given this away already. Ricoh have pretty much targeted this camera at the happy snapper who wants an easy to use camera that will give great snaps on holiday at a bargain price. This camera won't satisfy those who are hyper critical of their pictures or who demand a high level of control but for a cheap compact to capture memories it is simple to use and does the job.
Similar to...
Whilst I was testing this camera I came across a Pentax Optio S20. The similarities are striking. Apart from some lettering and the dial running in different directions the bodies are identical. Handling and image quality seems to be the same. I'd be very surprised if these cameras didn't start life as the same and received some cosmetic branding to fit Ricoh and Pentax's different requirements.
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Don't read the criticism of image quality and think this is a bad camera. It is a cheap camera with enough quality to provide snaps in good light. It is unfair to compare the image quality against cameras costing more than twice as much. If what you want is a beach and holiday camera then this is well worth consideration. If you demand higher quality or want more control then you may need to spend a little more money.
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Casio S600 specs
| Mega-pixels: | 6.16 |
Photo: | JPEG |
| Optical Zoom: | 3x |
RAW: | No |
| Digital Zoom: | 4x |
Aperture: | F/2.8-4.8 |
| LCD: | 2.2 inch |
Focal Length: | equiv. 34-102mm |
| Dimensions: | 87 x 25.5 x 60mm |
Shutter speed: | 1 sec to 1/1000 |
| Weight: | 130g |
Exposure: | ISO 50 to 2000 |
| Storage: | SD (16mb int) |
Movie: | MPEG (320x240@20fps) |
| Battery: | 2 AA |
Microphone: | Yes |
| Interface: | USB 2.0, AV |
PictBridge: | No |
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Included accessories:
USB cable, AV cable, hand strap, 2 AA batteries, camera case, software CD-ROM
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