ricoh r5 | sample image
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Details at a glance
Megapixels: 7.24
Optical Zoom: 7.1x
Digital Zoom: 3.6x
LCD: 2.5 inches
Storage: SD/MMC
We clicked with
Image quality, macro mode, speed, great zoom length
Shots in the dark
Occasional exposure issues, firmware glitches, zoom button
Links
More Ricoh information
www.ricoh.co.uk
Price Comparison:
Ricoh Caplio R5
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Squint and you'll easily mistake the R5 for an R4 or an R3. While other manufacturers are making cosmetic nips and tucks and adding scene modes that we doubt most people will use, Ricoh seem happy to stick with what they know and slowly turn up the pixel count with every revision. The latest of their “R” range has 7 million pixels. Six months ago that would have been considered extraordinary - right now it's on the high side of entry level.
Features
If you're used to the feature overload of some of the latest designer cameras then you're going to be in for a shock. It has “only” 8 scene modes and two of these are pretty specialised (skew correction and text enhancement). In a time when many cameras have 30 odd modes this may seem a bit spartan but at ThinkCamera we doubt that real world users actually use more than 3 or 4 modes. Ricoh has all the main bases covered with landscape, portrait, night, sport etc so I don't think there is really anything missing here. There's also a handy anti shake mode to keep your pictures sharp. I left this permanently on and all pictures were very good even to relatively slow shutter speeds.
Let's look at some of the features it does have.
Great zoom range
The 7.1x zoom goes from a useful 28mm to a very handy 200mm. We're used to seeing ultra thin cameras that run from about 35mm to about 110mm and it's great that this is both wider and longer than that. 28mm will give you some nice landscapes and 200mm is just about getting useful for some amateur wildlife shots. The zoom range is pretty well perfect for a travel camera.
Macro mode
Yeah - ALL compacts have a macro mode but the one on the R5 is worth mentioning. The manual calls it an “unsurpassed macro shooting function (which) allows you to capture details from a very close distance at only 1cm”.
Sounds interesting but a little abstract. Try this instead. Take a pound coin from your pocket and look at the side with the Queen's head on it. You'll see the word “Elizabeth”. With the Ricoh R5 1cm away I used the digital super macro and could isolate “lizabet”. That's using digital zoom but I printed the resulting 7 million pixel snap out at A4. The letters are beautifully crisp and sharp and I can see every nick and scratch on the coin (which are slightly out of focus due to the incredibly narrow depth of field at this range).
I know of no other camera in this price range that could produce a macro result like that. On a DSLR you would need a lens that costs more than the Ricoh Caplio R5 to approach this kind of close up quality. If you want a compact camera capable of extreme macro then stop reading now and just get a Ricoh R5.
Moveable focus point
This works very well with the macro function - especially if you are using a tripod. It allows you to move the focus point pretty well anywhere you want on the screen. Most cameras will allow you to choose from half a dozen or so focus points but the Ricoh R5 really does seem to let you position the focus point wherever you want it.
Shutter Lag
There isn't any. I'll rephrase that - “shutter lag is as short as 0.1 seconds”. That's in the same league as some DSLRs and really very quick for a compact. (The Nikon D50 and Canon 350D have both been timed at 0.1 seconds - a pro level DSLR will be less than half that). Obviously to achieve this you'll need to have already focussed the shot. Focussing can be a little on the sluggish side but once that's achieved the Ricoh R5 is as fast as pretty well any camera for shutter lag.
Handling
I'm going to give up talking about camera sizes - the Ricoh R5 is the height and width of a compact camera. It's a little bigger than a credit card but not so much that you'd notice without trying it. Although the lens retracts fully when it's turned off, the camera is 26mm thick (just over an inch). Not huge but noticeably thicker than the “designer” cameras we see. It will fit in your jeans pocket - unless you wear tight jeans.
Button layout is pretty standard - a 4 way controller plus central buttons and a line of shiny buttons to do various common actions. The zoom switch is tiny and hard to operate. On several occasions I had to push it a couple of times to make the lens zoom. Maybe the one I had was slightly sticky or my technique was off but it's nowhere as easy to use as lots of other cameras we see here.
At first I hated the menu options. To adjust the ISO takes an amazing 15 button presses just to get to the flyout menu. After a little while I found some shortcuts which help a little (though you need to remember that ISO is in group 3 to allow you to shortcut to it). Then I found the mysterious “ADJ” button. This does just what you need it to. Press it once and you are in exposure comp, twice and it's white balance and 3 times and it's ISO. Even better, it adapts to the shooting mode so in macro mode a 4th press allows you to adjust the focus point. Even better you can choose two of your favourite controls to the ADJ button. This isn't a revolutionary idea but it seems to work really well on the R5 and make up for the otherwise cumbersome menus.
Image quality
Let's cut to the chase. The Ricoh Caplio R5 is capable of some great images. Bright punchy colours (though the red looks a little off in some of the shots) and the lens is capable of resolving a wicked amount of detail. Purple fringing is pretty well absent - there is evidence of some cyan fringing on very high contrast edges but you really have to go looking for it. On the default setting, images are just a fraction over sharpened for my taste but this is tunable. I have some lovely A4 prints sitting on my desk and I'd be very happy to produce A3s from this camera,
The camera is also capable of some rather strange results. Some of these occurred when I was stressing the camera beyond what any reasonable person would do (I'm pretty sure most manuals are clear on not pointing a camera right into the sun). A couple occurred during casual photography in a dimly lit restaurant. All of these could be avoided by understanding how the camera works and selecting different shooting options but it's clear that the R5 can sometimes do things you don't expect. One odd picture was where the camera used a huge amount of flash, which nicely lit the background but completely bleached out the person sitting in front of it. On a couple of other occasions it wildly underexposed the scene. Both of these could be fixed by using a different metering mode but other cameras would have coped with these scenarios better. When I pointed the camera into the sun it just kind of freaked out - the screen showed weird colour shifts and the full size image shows a series of narrow vertical lines. I'd better stress that this was far from normal shooting conditions but I haven't seen anything quite like it before.
Noise is pretty good for a camera in this class. As long as the exposure is correct it won't give you anything really to worry about at ISO 200. ISO 400 is a little noisier as you'd expect but still nothing objectionable. ISO 800 is getting to the limit of what many people will tolerate in the shadow areas but in the main subject area it's not too bad. ISO 1600 is pretty noisy but by no means the worst I've seen. Again I'll stress that you need to compose and expose your pictures properly and you will always find noise if you go looking for it in the shadows. With all that in mind, even ISO1600 shots aren't terrible and I'd often choose high ISO with this camera over flash. When you are looking at noise in pictures be very careful of ones with flash on them - the light fall off will cause the background to be under illuminated and they will of course be much noisier than pictures that are exposed for the ambient light. Some of the restaurant snaps at ISO 400 had very noisy backgrounds but this is not the area you will look at on the picture and this kind of picture would generally not be printed very large anyway.
Whilst we are on flash - it's tiny and located next to the lens (as is the case with all compacts). As such it's pretty harsh and prone to red eye but no more so than you'd expect. It's also pretty easy to cover the flash with your finger.
Shooting
The Ricoh R5 takes a reasonable 2.5 seconds or so to power up. Shot to shot time is pretty good too - I managed 20 shots in 22 seconds in “normal” shooting mode which is a little less than 1 fps. That's pressing the button, releasing and pressing again.
In continuous shooting mode I managed an astonishing 100 frames in 42 seconds. That was shooting to a SanDisk Ultra II card. I actually opened the files to check that they were full resolution 7MP files. The Ricoh R5 seems capable of sustaining a rate of 2.4 frames per second until the card is full. That's pretty impressive in a camera in this class. Again, like the shutter lag, there are DSLRs that can be beaten for shooting speed by the Caplio R5.
What's not to like
I've already mentioned a couple of issues with this camera under the “on test” section. The multi point metering system can get fooled by some tricky scenes. I'll stress again that this can be easily got round by using a different metering mode but other cameras fared better under the same circumstances.
Also, during the course of a 4 day test, the camera “crashed” on me twice. It became completely unresponsive to any of the buttons. On one occasion there was an error message on the screen on the other the screen still showed me the view through the lens (and updated as I moved the camera). On both occasions this was resolved by removing the battery and putting it back in. In the light of these, I'm slightly suspicious of some of the times to zoom button appeared not to work. It seems there may be some firmware glitches for Ricoh to iron out.
Many users will find the menu system a little difficult to get used to but by customising the “ADJ” button most of these problems can be avoided.
To sum up
It would be very easy to walk past this camera in a shop and never even look at it. For it looks and feature list it is relatively expensive. Make no mistake though, this is an extremely capable camera. If you buy a Ricoh Caplio R5 I would advise spending a little time with the manual to get the best out of it. Some scenes will require you to make decisions and override the camera to get the best shots - but the best shots are very good indeed. This is a killer camera if you are into macro and should be very high on your shortlist for its 1cm close focusing. It is also an extremely fast camera. Once it has started up and focused it is very quick to take shots and seems capable of shooting at high speed for an extended period of time.
The two shutdowns concern me a little and I'd be interested to see if Ricoh release a firmware update or tweak this camera once it is on general sale.
Camera specification
| Mega-pixels: | 7.24 |
Photo: | JPEG |
| Optical Zoom: | 7.1x |
RAW: | No |
| Digital Zoom: | 3.6x |
Aperture: | f/3.3-4.8 |
| LCD: | 2.5 inch |
Focal Length: | equiv. 28-200mm |
| Dimensions: | 96 x 55 x 26mm |
Shutter: | 8 sec to 1/2000 |
| Weight: | 140g |
Exposure: | ISO 64 to 1600 |
| Storage: | SD/MMC |
Movie: | 640X480@30fps |
| Int. Mem: | 26mb |
Battery: | Li-ion DB-60 |
| Interface: | USB 2.0, AV |
PictBridge: | Yes |
