Sunday 13 September 2009

Ricoh GR Digital III Review - Part 1

I have been playing around with the settings, trying to customize the camera to my liking.
I have assigned FN1 to AF/Snap mode selection.
FN2 is set to switching metering modes.
MY1 is configured to use Auto, with multi-zone metering and spot AF.
MY2 is configured to use Aperture Priority, with multi-zone metering and spot AF.
MY3 is configured to use Manual Exposure, with spot metering and spot AF.
The zoom button is assigned to exposure compensation (default).
The adj lever is set to White Balance, ISO, Bracketing and Image Quality. I am not sure I like the adj lever very much - but it is useful way of getting to frequently used settings.

The way you select the snap focus distance is frustrating. You have keep pressing the up button and turn the front wheel. Why can't this be a single button job? Or even better using a focus wheel?

AF seems fast enough for most uses I am going to put this to. For people shots I would probably stick with the snap focus mode.

It seems that if you want the camera to be ready to take pictures, you should keep it switched on. If you switch off, the lens retracts inside and then switching on takes a short while (about a second). It is annoying to continuously switch on/off with the lens moving in and out. Am more used to DSLRs where the lens stays put.

Manual Exposure mode is cool. The exposure is actually shown on screen and you can see the scene becoming brighter or darker as you change the shutter speed and aperture combination. I like this.

The depth of field display when using snap focus in AE/MF mode is nice as it lets you pick the right aperture to get the maximum area in focus.

I dislike the up/down/left/right buttons. It would have been better to have a wheel like the Canon G10.

Now for some samples:



www.flickr.com





No comments:

Post a Comment