harmsr,
I hear you buddy however Tony Rose just told me that no new GRD is on the horizon until at least June "so far as he knows." And since he had a new "used" version for $537 I took it. Now let's see if i eat crow next month : )
For anyone interested here is what one of the hottest GRD jocks (
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matador_snaps/page2/ ) emailed me in regard to the GRD as his P&S of choice- this (and his photography) pushed me in the GRD direction:
"But talking about the Ricoh, and answering your questions
in order:
If i like it? I'm sure you know those small wonders that
were the Ricohs GR1, well, this one is, in some ways, their
digital equivalent.
Prime 28mm lens (with maximum aperture of 2.4) that i´m
happy to use full open all the time, its sharp all the way.
Nice contrast and handles light in a special nice way, for a
small sensor camera.
Using it is pretty straightforward, two dials (as nikons
for ex) that in manual mode control the aperture and
shutter speed, one of them when pressed down provide access
to four programable functions. In mine i have White Balance,
ISO settings, Focus Mode and Metering. This way in a "real"
second i can alter this settings. What i love most in this
camera is the "no fiddling on deep menus" approach by
Ricoh. A camera that i had used extensively that provided
the same easy and informal use of this one is my small
Rollei 35SE.
The visuals are stunning, at least for me, just like a real
camera
😉 Magnesium body, all black, no funky chromes, clean
layout of buttons. I've been using for only a few months,
but until now, i noticed that everyone looks toward it as
to an lazy 80s P&S camera, and so, they walk by without
many thoughts on it, and that's a good thing in many
aspects.
The RAW writing times are long, 9 to 11 secs by my
experience. It's annoying but i come to become familiar
with this gap moments... its a time i now look towards the
scene and think in other ways of shooting it. The real
problem is when something is happening in your front and
you have only a chance or two to capture it. This is a
constrain of using this camera as a prime camera, because i
want to retain the most juice of the colors and light it can
handle, if i had another one, maybe i would switch it to
JPEG... or maybe not
😉
Saying that, the JPEGs of this camera are very good, with
very natural colors and with a kind of low contrast values
that work very well if you have to work them on some
software.
The noise. It exists, but it has some personality in it...
the shape of the dots (yes they are mostly dots, instead of
that grid of squares you see everywhere) blend well in the
images, Ricoh didn't tried to remove or blur it, and that
is good, because if you really want to, you can use some
good plugins to perform this task, instead of some limited
processing of a small camera. Noise isn't really an issue
in this camera for me, it exists but doesn't interfere on
the images in a striking and visually shocking way. Instead
it ads some "familiarity" to the images. On some of my
images you can see a lot of grain, much because of some
extreme post processing with the levels of the image.
Shutter delay doesn't exist in this camera! Because of the
high depth field always available, even if you press the
shutter all the way in a rush moment it stops the focusing
process and take the picture at that same moment. In most
of the cases this works perfectly, only if you where trying
to capture some close (1 meter or so) subject this could
lend to mismatched focus. But in any situation, manual mode
or full auto, the shutter delay is very small, and this, to
me, is of very importance on the experience of
photographing.
The accessory i use most is the 21 mm adapter, that is
marvelous. Low distortion and the images are sharp as they
would without it. The viewfinder i use less, but this is a
habit i will try to correct.
The software i use is Adobe Lightroom, it has all the
functions i need in image processing and combines this with
the handling and cataloging of large number of files. All
this in one package. I highly recommend it.
To this date no other camera replaced this one in my
opinion. You really need to hold one and see if it looks
good for you, i'm sure a Leica user will appreciate the
concept behind this small camera. In fact i know some users
of Leicas that have the GR-D, precisely as a backup camera,
and all them come to be really found of it."
