Stunning pics from a non-mainstream camera (Ricoh R10)

Member Name: davomrmac

Product:	Ricoh R10
Date:	08/01/09 (199 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Small, superb screen, superb features, easy to use, excellent photos

Disadvantages: No optical viewfinder, a little expensive

The Ricoh R10 is a nice compact camera, offering you something a little different from the mainstream models from more well known brands.

Firstly, let me cover what is the same. Well it has a 10 megapixel sensor, which is about the average standard for 2009. A nice 3.0-inch screen, very vivid colours and sharp. The battery is tiny and charges quickly (about 90 minutes) in the supplied charger. In the same compartment as the battery you can slot an SD card (none supplied with the camera, although it does have 54MB of internal memory). The power button is on the top and it is tiny and quite fiddly. Then the shutter button has the rocker control around it for zooming in and out. The back is really nicely laid out. A dedicated 'play' button for looking at your photos, four way rocker joystick control for navigating menus and going into macro and flash modes. Then there are buttons for menu, function, timer/trash and display modes. Back to the top again and the rotating dial, where you normally have access to manual, auto modes etc... is slightly different. It offers auto mode, easy mode, video and scenes, then two options labeled MY1 and MY2 (covered in what's different below).

The MY1 and MY2 settings on this top dial are one of the things that sets the R10 apart from other compact cameras. It allows you to make lots of adjustments, such as image size, black & white mode and then save these to one of the two presets. Then rotating the dial selects all of the settings you made, very easily and very quickly. Other nice features are the 1:1 mode that gives you square format (like polaroid) pics out of the camera with no cropping needed. There is an integrated lens cover, so when you turn it off the lens in protected. The zoom is a massive 7.1x optical, so really nice and powerful giving you the equivalent of a 28-200mm lens. The 3.0-inch screen is really high resolution, 460,000 pixels, it is really bright and has great viewing angles. It also auto-rotates, so you turn the camera 90 degrees and some of the functions rotate, or you view pictures and get them correctly displayed. The Electronic Level is also nice, it shows a line that changes colour when you have the camera held level, nice for scene shots that you want straight.

The only thing that would have made this 100% is an optical viewfinder, but alas there is none. That said, I have taken almost 300 photos on a single charge and not been disappointed with any. At just under £200 it is a little expensive, but the photos have that feel and pro-edge to them. It looks like they were taken with a camera that is a little special... so it gets my vote.

Summary: Well worth buying if you want photos that stand out from the crowd

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