Ricoh GXR A12

A sturdy, but compact body, beating with a DSLR heart

Having already looked at the Ricoh GXR with the S10 sensor/lens unit it had the look and feel up an upmarket compact. It had the price tag of one as well. However, the whole point of this system is interchangeability so here we go with the A12 unit. A press of the sliding switch on the body, off comes the compact unit and on goes the DSLR-like A12, rather like Clark Kent nipping into the nearest phone booth and emerging as Superman. You see, unlike an SLR, it isn’t just the lens that gets swapped over, it’s the sensor and processing engine as well. So instead of that ratty 10Mp CCD you now get a 12Mp CMOS chip. This has a number of implications, not least expectation because the A12 unit is just shy of £600 taking your investment to over a grand, even if you didn’t buy the S10 unit to start with. Now, you can pick up a Nikon D300 for around the £1000 mark, you could buy any number of mid-range DSLRs with a couple of lenses for that kind of money, but here, your £1000 buys you a compact little camera, with an APS-C 12Mp CMOS sensor and a 50mm macro lens. It’s actually a 33mm lens, but with focal length extension what you get in the picture is the equivalent of 50mm. Good job really, I’d hate to be told it was a 50mm lens and come away with a 75mm reach. As it is, it’s hard to get anything close up into the shot at 50mm.

One thing anyone buying into this system has to watch out for is aspect ratio. Yes, you’ll be slapping your thigh and cursing yourself for a fool while muttering “ah, me aspect ratio!” to the bemusement of the locals. Why? Well, in the menu system, you can set the camera up to use 3:2, 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios. Nothing wrong with that in itself, however, here’s the hair-puller, the CCD has an aspect ratio of 4:3 and the CMOS one of 3:2 but the system doesn’t automatically change to the aspect ratio of the unit that’s plugged in. Yep, you have it set up for 4:3 because you’re using the S10 compact unit, you whip it off for some macro action with the A12 and it stays at 4:3, cropping the edges off your pictures. Thankfully what you see on the monitor screen is what you get, so there aren’t missing parts, but to have to go into the menu system to change it every time is pretty stupid.

As well as now getting extra resolution – providing you haven’t cropped it off inadvertently – the change of sensor brings in other changes. Firstly, the video resolution is increased from a lacklustre 640x480 to a higher, though not true HD, 1280x768 resolution. The other two changes are depth of field and aperture selection, though maybe that can count as one and we’ll have image quality as the second instead. Compact cameras generate lots of depth-of-field, but have a limited aperture range. So, f2.8 on a compact, is more like f8 on a DSLR. The potential for awesome front to back sharpness when selecting f/8 on the compact is mitigated by the fact that the lens and sensor are so small they don’t actually resolve the detail that well. Anyway, on a DSLR type sensor/lens arrangement such as the A12, you get an aperture range of f/2.5-/f22 for true front to back depth-of-field, the sensor being big enough to pick up the detail. Best of all, at the wide open apertures, you get very shallow depth-of-field. This is vital for classy looking portraits which is what, really, this lens is for. And macro shots. Yes, it’s a macro lens as well, resolving at 1:2 but you can utilise that shallow d-o-f to create really nice effects.

Of course, this is a 50mm fixed lens, so no optical zoom. That means walking closer if you want to focus on something in the distance, or, and brace yourself, using the digital zoom. Now, ordinarily, being hung, drawn and quartered is usually a just punishment for anyone using a digital zoom but there are times when, if you don’t have the S10 unit as well, that it’s going to be necessary. The digital zoom here doesn’t just crop the picture, it interpolates the crop back up to full size as well. As you can imagine, the more you zoom, the worse it looks. Using to around 2x zoom, so that’s a range of around 50mm-100mm gives an okay result. A bit of sharpening in Photoshop and no-one will be any the wiser. Push it out to 4x and the result is softer than Andrex toilet paper.

And so to image quality. It’s easier to control noise on CMOS sensors and that’s the case here. The GXR does a very good job of processing it, and controlling chromatic aberration as well. On a test through the ISO range what was noticeable was that it threw the metering out, with the final ISO3200 image being overexposed. At ISO400 and 800 though the results really are perfectly fine. Where the sensor struggle is in area of continuous colour that are in the shade and here it can break up with low-light noise coming into play. On portraits that actually looks a lot worse, so instead of trying to capture someone at a low ISO in low light, you are better increasing the ISO, trading well-suppressed ISO noise against low light image tone variation. The other point to note is that the ISO range starts at 200 on the A12, as opposed to 100 on the S10 unit.

All of this is fine and dandy, but now we come back round to the beginning. If the body was £100 and the A12 lens/sensor £300 then this would be a handsome little package that was a viable alternative to those wanting an affordable DSLR in the smallest space possible. But it isn’t. It’s going to cost you over a grand and the clincher is that even with the DSLR-style sensor and lens, you still have compact quality focussing, which is poor, fiddly little controls, no optical viewfinder and a flabby continuous shooting rate. Ricoh reckons the GXR plus A12 gives you DSLR-style performance in the smallest package possible. Well, to paraphrase US Senator Lloyd Bensten’s famous put-down to Dan Quayle, I own DSLRs, I’ve used DSLRs, the DSLR is my camera of choice. The Ricoh GXR/A12 is no DSLR.

Final Verdict The A12 unit brings higher expectations which the focussing and shooting rate can’t meet. It’s great for macro and good for portraits but not for much else and for this you are paying over £1000. OVERALL

Duncan has a long history in photography as a portrait/wedding photographer, a published author of no fewer than 13 photography books and member of Royal Photographic Society.