A few days ago I posted an article reviewing my Ricoh R1v digital compact camera, and today I'm going to add to that post by describing my experiences of shooting with it, and show some Ricoh R1v sample pictures.
First, for the impatient, here are the pictures.
Ricoh R1v sample pictures
In order to try the Ricoh R1v out, I took a walk around the old town area of Stevenage this morning and used the camera in the way it was intended - as a snapshot camera, and the pictures I took are shown above.
My impressions of the camera are:
- Although it is difficult to see images on the back of the camera to compose pictures, the addition of an optical viewfinder meant that it was much easier to use than LCD only cameras
- When I imported the pictures above, I discovered that it doesn't auto rotate images taken in Portrait mode - they have to be done manually.
- Obviously, being small and light means it is easy to keep in a pocket and take out and use at any time. The start-up time is pretty quick.
On to the actual pictures. Just to be clear, these pictures were all taken in Jpeg mode and the camera controlled every aspect of the picture. They were imported into Lightroom and a very small amount of tweaking done to balance the exposure and in some cases the pictures were slightly cropped to correct some lines which were not straight.
My findings are:
- The highlights are blown in some pictures and can't be recovered in Lightroom, although that is not really surprising for a camera with a small sensor.
- The fill in flash fired automatically on some of the pictures and this resulted in some good balanced exposures.
- It isn't possible to easily isolate subjects with such a small sensor - again, this is to be expected.
- The camera is good for macro photos because of the high depth of field.
Video performance
I also took a short video clip which shows the (pretty poor) video performance. Don't forget, this camera is about 12 years old, so I didn't expect it to be too good.
