First, I’m proud to be part of James Duncan Davidson’s red color bias.
Speaking of red, step deep into beauty with Alex Waterhouse-Hayward’s A Study in Red (& Purple).
Finally, on my trip to Japan, it became clear that the hot new pocket cam is totally the Ricoh GX-100. Two or three different heavy geeks I ran across are using it; with the notable exception of Akihito Fujii, who has the even-more-esoteric Ricoh GR Digital, and let me know he didn’t think much of the GX-100’s zoom lens.
Above, a scene from an interview I did with three Japanese tech journalists, showing a GX-100 in action. Aaaack! I can’t find their name-cards! The fellow closest to the camera is Tomihisa Fuon, I know that because he’s appeared here before. [Is this cool or what: Yohei Yamamoto, who works for Ricoh and is the person in the middle, writes a comment below identifying himself and the photographer, who is Inao-san, editor of Web+DB Press. Thank you Yamamoto-san, and I’m terribly sorry about misplacing the cards. And of course I should have said that the man in the background at the left is H. Tony Sugimoto, of Sun PR in Japan.]
Anyhow, one or two of my colleagues let me fondle their GX-100s, and I looked at one in Yodabashi’s Akihabara store, but I’m glad I didn’t buy it because it’s a lot cheaper this side of the Pacific.
That’s if you can get one; the exclusive US importer is Adorama and they’re sold out. There are a few out there on EBay though.
The ergonomics are just delicious, but peeking in the DPReview Ricoh Forum reveals one big downside: it’s pig-slow writing RAW pictures to the card. Also some reliability problems. Still, it’s nice that at least one manufacturer cares about making something that fits in your pocket and still appeals to photo-geeks.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Jack Baty (Jun 16 2007, at 05:16)
The Ricoh's are great. I have the GRD and it's simply the nicest handling digital compact I've every used. Keep an eye on Popflash Photo (http://www.popflash.com/). The GX-100 is currently sold out there also, but Popflash is great to work with and quite helpful.
[link]
From: Jon Ellis (Jun 16 2007, at 05:27)
I mentioned a price aggregation site. This is the page for the GX100:
http://kakaku.com/item/00502011141/
Navigation is about as easy as you'd expect...
[link]
From: Yohei Yamamoto (Jun 16 2007, at 22:40)
The GX100 guy is Inao-san who is an editor of "WEB+DB Press" manazine.
And in the center is me.
I'm very proud of working in Ricoh :-).
[link]
From: Rick Frankel (Jun 20 2007, at 09:01)
Being a photo-geek living near adorama, I have a GR Digital, and was looking at the GX100 (which adorama calls the Caplio-GX100).
It looks a lot like the GR and has a similar control layout, but it's less well made (the control dials are actually switches, and the body feels like aluminum instead of magnesium).
The raw write speed is about twice as fast as the GR, but still slow (about 5-6 seconds).
I also much prefer the optical add-on finder of the GR vs. the add on evf of the capilo, but the 24-70 equiv. zoom is about perfect coverage.
BTW, they had a few in stock last week when i was there...
[link]