Ricoh announces the Caplio GX100

Tags photography ricoh caplio gx100 digicam

Posted on March 30, 2007 by Mark

Caplio GX100

Is this the answer to all my prayers? Richoh have just announced their latest compact camera: the Caplio GX100. This is a compact camera with a very wideangle lens (24mm in 35mm terms), that records RAW images and has a hotshoe. It sounds almost perfect!

Sadly the cynic in me has some reservations. When Ricoh released an earlier camera that I thought would be the bees knees, it had a less than satisfactory sensor. I know you have to accept noise in the smaller sensors found in most compacts, but why fight the megapixel war when there noise war still needs to be won?

When the GR Digital was announced I had a similar feeling to now. That had a very well recieved lens (fixed at 28mm in 35mm terms, tack sharp), but suffered from noise at all sensitivities. This wouldn’t really be a problem if you were producing B&W images and like the ‘grain’ effect, but coupled with very slow write times and a high price tag I decided against getting one.

I’m hopeful that this new camera will improve on some of these issues.

From the press release:

The Caplio GX100 is a high-performance camera cram packed with advanced functions including (1) a 24 to 72 mm equivalent high-performance wide zoom lens (Caplio GX8: 28 to 85 mm equivalent) that can be expanded to even ultra-wide-angle shooting equivalent to 19 mm using the optional wide conversion lens, (2) being the first digital camera to support a removable electronic viewfinder (LCD viewfinder), and (3) high image quality thanks to the 10.01megapixel effective CCD (Caplio GX8: 8.24-megapixel) and popular Smooth Imaging Engine II image processing.

The GX100 (with electronic viewfinder included) will be available at the end of April 2007 at £399.99 inc VAT, so I for one am looking forward to getting my hands on one for a trial!

Comments

One Response to “Ricoh announces the Caplio GX100”

  1. Sigma DP1 Compact Digital Camera : Moozilla: The Gadget Blog on April 1st, 2007 3:11 pm

    […] recently written about the Ricoh Caplio GX100, I thought I should also mention the Sigma DP1. The DP1 was announced back in September 2006 at […]

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