Ricoh Caplio R5

Opinion: I have taken daylight and night photos with and without flash. I have only gotten two ro three reasonable photos out of 50+ so far. Most have been very, very grainy. Very unexceptable, crappy to be exact. A freind of mine got one a fews day before I did and is getting the same results. He has emailed Ricoh, but we have not heard anything.

Opinion: I got the R5 a few days ago to replace my Canon S40 snapshot that I always carry with me. Until now I only used it for landscape and monument photography. It is in general very responsive, and the image quality is quite good for such a small snapshot camera. The shadows are better than those of the camera it replaced, but I would prefer less contrasty pictures. The light measurement is accurate in normal scenes, but I got several underexposed pictures in dull lighting situations.

A couple of tests to the usefulness of high ISO gave the expected good results until ISO 200 and still acceptable at 400 (with some color degradation). Above 400 the R5 should only be used in desperate situations. However in Auto ISO the camera never goes above 200.
It seems that my R5 doesn’t suffer from the noise problem others have found.

Test to the camera shake correction at 200 mm shows that 2 stops are gained with confidence and about 50% success may be expected at 1/25 s.

Opinion: I'm afraid the R5 is a flawed-gem. It has what it takes to be a top-notch pocket camera, but Ricoh had a few "execution" issues, at least with my exemplar (though many other users also report issues with the AF system).

I love a lot of things about this camera, including things that most people are worried about - resolution, corner sharpness, image-processing, noise levels, CA/PF levels. The zoom range and macro are great, and so is most of the user-interface. The R5 is definitely capable of smashing results, but is has too many issues to make me recommend it.

The main feature that convinced me to get the R5 instead of Ricoh's GX8 (which I absolutely adore) was the better video mode, but now that I think about it again, I see that I should have gone for the GX8 and get another pocket camera - a Fuji F30 or F20 - for the video and situations that require high ISO. The price would have been higher, but functionality would have been superb (enough, I believe, to keep my DSLR at home a lot more). I really dig the concept of two complementing pocket cameras (one in each pocket) and I'll probably go this route soon.

You can see pictures I took with the R5 here:

http: //boren.sent.com/Ricoh/R5/
(remove the space before the "//" when copying the link)

Opinion: You can read my mini-review and comparison with other 28mm Pocket Digicams here:
http://www.w4rmk.com/canon/canonsd800is.htm