Ricoh Caplio R7

Ricoh's latest feature-packed budget bridge compact

The Ricoh Caplio R7 offers an impressive range of features for a compact in its price band. A focal range equivalent to 28-200mm gives you the opportunity to experiment with both wide and macro shots, great if you want to explore creative or documentary photography.

At 8.2 megapixels with a maximum resolution of 3,264 x 2,448, images are certainly large enough and of sharp enough quality to make up A1 sized prints that are crisp and well defined. An optical zoom of 7.1x increases the clarity and focal depth of your photos considerably, so you can be sure that even at large paper sizes, your prints won’t lose detail. The zoom even offers two speeds, fast and slow. This is handy if you’re photographing nature subjects and need to move fast to capture a moment, and it also gives you much greater control over exactly how much zoom you want. In fact the R7’s zoomed-in shots are very impressive overall: clear and precise with colour, tone and texture all represented flawlessly.

The successor to the award-winning Ricoh Caplio R6, the R7 has built on its heritage with the addition of the new Smooth Imaging Engine III, Ricoh’s latest image processor. The R7’s ancestry is also apparent in its slim, light shell – Ricoh boasts that this camera is actually ‘the slimmest in its class’, and while it’s of a comparable size to other compacts we’ve seen, it blows them out of the water in terms of features. The R7 is far more like a miniature bridge camera than it is an ordinary, everyday compact.

The R7’s control system is simple for amateurs to operate, but also offers a wealth of easily accessible features for the more advanced user. On top of the camera are the zoom and the Mode Selector – a simple slider button which offers you a choice of three basic shooting modes: MY, Scene and Auto. The R7 offers a choice of 12 scene modes, from the classic portrait, landscape and lighting-conditions-based options to a ‘zoom macro’, which lets you really make the most of that wide-angle, telephoto-capable lens. The MY option, meanwhile, allows you easy access to your own preferred settings. You can assign a choice of two settings for quick use, and they can be almost any imaging option you like – giving confident photographers the chance to use their favourite manual tweaks with the ease and speed of scene modes. For novices, the third option on the Mode Selector is Auto, designed for point-and-shooters. On the back of the camera there is also Ricoh’s unique ADJ button, another control to which you can assign your own preferred features.

It doesn’t take long to grasp the basics of this slightly unusual interface, and once you do you’ll become a confident user of the R7 pretty quickly. The great thing about this camera is that manually, you can get as much or as little as you want out of it. It’s so easy and intuitive to use that soon even under-confident users will find themselves experimenting with more advanced techniques. Whilst taking our test shots we were easily able to experiment with almost the full range of the R7’s capabilities.

Using basic scene modes can give some above-average results. Landscape shots are colourful and wide with well-balanced tones, though if you capture any people or animals in shot whilst using this scene mode then expect them to look a little static and stilted. The zoom macro offers almost universally excellent results. At full zoom and throughout the zoom range, subjects are well defined in terms of tone and shape. The range of flash options is good, and Soft Flash in particular stands out, with excellent image quality. Through The Lens metering also offers a great opportunity to experiment with light and reflective effects. One of our test shots was of a branch of glossy, red-black foliage in a mixture of intense evening sunlight and leafy shade, which thanks to both Soft Flash and TTL metering was captured in a myriad range of reflected deep blues, greens and reds.

With an easy-to-use, pleasant interface which offers a good range of automatic presets as well as endlessly configurable manual options and faultless, gorgeous image quality, the Ricoh Caplio R7 doesn’t fit into one simple category of camera. On one hand, it’s ideal for keen, fairly knowledgeable and even advanced users, and would certainly be the ideal companion on an intermediate photography course. Its flattering yet lifelike imagery would also be a boon to anyone studying an arts subject who needs to shoot inspirational images and record their own work. And yet, it’s also a fantastic point-and-shoot: easy to use, with a simple interface that can hold the hand of even the rawest beginner and a range of simple options that really optimise the tone, definition and colour of your images. The features and capabilities of the R7 are an excellent result for Ricoh, and will produce excellent results for its users, too.

Final Verdict The R7 has achieved a rare thing- a perfect score. its features, usability, quality and price all richly deserve it. OVERALL

Claire started studying photography over six years ago where she was intrigued by the act of image making. Claire has a great passion for traditional photographic methods however she’s found the change to the digital medium to be a fascinating advancement.