RICOH GRiii: COMPACT MARVEL (MPB TEST DRIVE)
REVIEW BY NEALE JAMES
My thanks to MPB.com for the loan of kit for this feature.
I know what you’re saying…
“But Neale, this isn’t the latest GR, why the iii, what’s the deal?”
Well, I have heard friends and peers eulogise about this camera for some time now and in that this is an MPB test drive, it’s a quality used camera that is on my ‘watch list,’ so here goes.
Let’s start with some of the tech facts and figures: The Ricoh GRiii is a ‘fit in your pocket’ 24MP APS-C format camera with a 28mm equivalent f2.8 lens and a teaspoon’s worth of internal memory, which I’ll come to in a moment.. It is reported to have been a pet project of those who worked in R&D at Ricoh Towers, and although it has been superseded now, I think I ‘get’ the idea that this became personal for the team. This is/was a camera that clearly matured with each version, a piece of kit that won many admirers including a friend of the show, Sean Tucker, who has certainly spoken with positive vibes about this compact picture maker.
Under the hood/bonnet, Ricoh added some new additions; a touch-sensitive screen (though I still can’t get on with these personally) and sensor stabilisation, useful for handheld street moments when you get a little enthusiastic with ‘wave your camera in the air, like you just don’t care’.
And price-wise, well this is a ‘bricks and mortar’ camera, perhaps not like Fujifilm’s X100V, which at the time of writing sells for more second-hand than a list new-price, if of course you can even find one, but it does hold its value. The X100V sales frenzy owes its popularity to a TikTokker with a penchant to vintage (who knew?) it having trad’ styling and filmic colour within the gubbins. One ‘unfortunate’ word from an influencer, and this too could become a victim of popufluencing, rendering it almost impossible to sensibly afford. Let’s not tell ‘em huh?
Out of the traps, I’m a photographer who likes to see the world through an eyepiece, with the exception of shooting in video mode, the occasional flip screen composition and/or using my iPhone. Even when those sure-fire flip screen moments represent themselves, I’ll still make life a little dustier for my jacket top and lay face down so as to be able to glance through the eyepiece.
“Neale, why are you face down in the dirt; flip the screen, won’t you? Hell’s bells, man, crouch down and point that screen up. You’ll save on laundry as much as anything!”
If like me, you like to shoot a little film now and then, you’ll be familiar with the comedic routine of firing off the first four or five frames and looking down at the back each time to chimp, the result of digital muscle memory. Well, this was a similar experience. Over the three weeks I had this camera, I continually found myself lifting Mr. Ricoh to my eye, to find only a hot shoe and no hole through which to peep. I like the size of the world through an eyepiece, there’s a separation that is often the subject of this show, a sort of room to remove yourself from accountancy bills and canvassing politicians. The world slows down, just a little in an eyepiece, it’s a disconnect I enjoy, so not having that, or at least the choice, is probably my only quibble, though you can add a non-EVF approximate ‘thing to look through box’ on the top, which might comfort my lament, but brings with other problems like parallax.
“Neale, sorry did you say parallax, what the…?”
Parallax is an effect in photography where the image seen in the viewfinder is not framed the same as the image seen through the lens, because the viewfinder is in a slightly different position to the lens.
All the same, if it were mine to keep, I’d probably buy a non-EVF approximate ‘thing to look through box’ as a kind of comfort blanket, a nod to my norm.
APS-C is an ecosystem I know well; it’s not a sensor size that I feel uncomfortable with or using in any capacity, including professionally for my work in social photography, though I’ve had my run-ins with the look and feel in terms of colour.
So let’s talk about that facet. I shoot RAW professionally. Despite the Fujifilm cameras I use and have used being lauded for colour science and rendition, I’ve found that APS-C cameras tend to do something rather unpleasant to skin tones, or it may be that I have found it difficult to snap out of seeing only Canon colour as an acceptable hue.
I didn’t test drive the camera in terms of portraiture, and this certainly wouldn’t be my focal length of choice for intimate close-up work, so I stuck to territory and landscape I could see myself working with when it came to carrying this about. What… a delight. The JPEGs in standard issue straight out of the camera are rich, bold and not at all thin, and the RAW files, easy to work with and push around in Lightroom, my chosen editing software. The image above made in London was woefully underexposed when I made it and I think you can see the shadows were going to put up too much of a fight on the left-hand side (as indeed they did) but the sky, well, it came back as expected, but what I was particularly delighted about was the figure on the yellow steps did not become an advert for fringing. There we go I thought, Ricoh 1 - Terrible Harsh Late Afternoon Winter Sun 0.
In 2023 I embarked upon my photographic 365, and this is a camera that lends itself beautifully to a project of that kind. I feel like I want to carry it, despite my iPhone 14Pro having the first RAW output I’ve had in a smartphone, although RAW files from said iPhone retain a baked-in sharpen setting like the JPEGs, all RAW files are NOT equal. Size matters when it comes to carrying a camera every day.
I’ve owned a handful of EDC cameras, my first being the original Canon Ixus, a small silver box that I took on honeymoon in 2004. It was a 2MP ‘powerhouse’ outputting a ‘whopping’ 1600 pixel wide image. I remember using it on safari that trip, much to the amusement of a couple who were somewhat surprised a professional might choose to carry something that small around during such an important once-in-a-lifetime experience. 2004 was still the time when being professional meant carrying something worthy of a tripod purchase to go with it. Of course, it was entirely useless making pictures of wildlife, no matter how dangerously close our guide drove to a waterhole at feeding time. But that’s not really what I was making pictures of. I wanted photographs of the something and nothings, the details of where we stayed, the lads on the beach who carved daily messages on driftwood to sell to visiting tourists. I didn’t know it at the time, but that Canon Ixus was my first ‘sketchbooker’.
This camera, this new age of EDC is space-age tech compared to that Ixus, with its decent latitude and reasonably wide dynamic range, the ability to shoot HDR, full HD video (note no 4K), built-in ND, and four stop’s worth of image stabilisation. I know many have the feature, but as you’ll see by the first few displayed images, I did engage macro mode, and this was easy and sharp to use, both in terms of time to focus and physical files produced. What, is not to like about that list?
It does sit on the pricy side considering the build, I distinctly remember for example the Ixus was a metal body, whilst this feels like one unfortunate drop on a stone floor and you’d be picking up pieces that pinged off in battle. It is something that I’d read in almost every review, but here’s the trade-off… do you want a small EDC that you almost forget you’re carrying it’s so light, or a small metal plate that pulls your top jacket pocket out of shape? And on that note, the battery is a trade off too. I took this camera out on particularly cold days, examples of that are right at the top of the piece, and I noted the battery levels dropped more briskly than I expected. Small camera = small battery = less photos per charge = buy yourself a spare, or two - if you’re street shooting all day and into the evening. There is much going on under the hood with all that image stabilisation and so on, so it’s certainly not something I would mark this camera down on.
This may sound a strange turn of phrase for a ‘camera reviewer’ to use, but I think the photographs produced by the GRiii have a delicate nature to them. Now, I can’t quantify that in any technical manner or provide science to support that feeling, because that’s exactly what it is, a feeling. But if feeling is one of the most important ingredients to photography, then take it from me, I enjoy the pictures this camera makes and more to the point, I enjoyed being the maker behind the lens. The rapid snap focus is a positive, as are the easy-to-use features within the touchscreen, something I usually switch off, but minus eyepiece, this is a welcome detail.
But I’ll cast all that aside, for the feeling. Yes, it feels like a camera I want to take every day along with my smartphone, keys and spare packet of Garibaldis. That may appear a thin part of this write-up, but this is one of the ‘somethings’ that had me resent the doorbell, on the day the courier dropped by to retrieve the camera after three weeks.
In preparation for receiving this compact marvel, I read a few reviews online and noted some of the ‘issues’ photographers felt muddied the experience of a camera much revered otherwise. So, let me deal with the list of gripes I came across when I was reading about the camera.
Screen issues. I’d read some thoughts about the screen being too tricky to see in harsh sunlight and difficult to refer to for accurate focusing. The latter could be fair, though I learned to trust the camera as long as I was broadly happy about my focusing in terms of manual distance calculated or using the autofocus. What didn’t look too sharp on the backscreen was in reality nicely ship-shape in the edit. The GRiii does not feature a tilt screen, but surely this comes down to the lightweight nature of the camera and size? The words trade and off.
It feels a little too plastic. It all comes back to the weight consideration doesn’t it, every time? No I wouldn’t want to drop it, and especially with the lens protruding, but I didn’t feel it was overly plastic, no.
Flash. I don’t use mine too much on the X100V, but I have from time to time. There is no flash on the GRiii. Not even a tincy one, though tincy flashes provide all the quality of light you’d expect from something made to humour rather than serve.
Internal memory. I wondered why folk might find this an ‘issue?’ Surely this is one of those, “Have this one on me for free,” moments? Yes, this camera has a little bit of internal memory for when you, like I did on the first outing, forget to pop in an SD card. The naysayers comment that 2Gb is a ridiculously inadequate amount of memory and not worth the inclusion, but it certainly saved my bacon, as they say. Think of it like your car’s reserve fuel tank, though the analogy is not watertight, because you don’t use your reserve in that order.
Oh, and a neat segue into the watertight or rather weatherproofing features of this camera. Umm, it’s not weatherproof to any great degree. I’ve had compact Fujifilm underwater cameras, and there are entirely weather-sealed smartphones available too now, even ones that you can take for a swim, so I’m putting this down to four-year-old tech, at a time weather-sealing didn’t seem so mission critical in terms of attractive specs.
WOULD I SPEND MY HARD-EARNED CASH ON THE RICOH GRiii?
A resounding yes. Easy to use, excellent image quality, a menu you don’t need a degree to understand, emergency on-board fuel tank (which I used with real purpose), totally pocketable (and I mean jeans too) and super output in RAW or JPEG. It is a camera I can honestly say is easy to take anywhere. I haven’t had a chance to use the wide angle adaptor, nor did I pop a flash unit on, but that wouldn’t change my thoughts or opinion anyway. If I wanted a really good low light camera, well, 3200 ISO is about the max I have been comfortable to drive the sensor, but I’m sure with some more considered Lightroom tests, I could find a way to deal with that. So yes, yes and yes.
