Digital cameras forum: Ricoh Caplio R6 Review

Ricoh has worldwide distribution of their products, with the American office located in New Jersey.

But they have not had much impact in selling digital cameras in the USA.

They are better known in the United Kingdom, Europe and the Asian markets. Their biggest impact in photography was with their twin lens film cameras.

Since their digital camera sales are so low in the USA, the American reviewers pretty much ignore it.

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I broke down and purchased the Caplio R6 a few weeks ago for a few trips i would be going on. The camera has solid build quality and is more compact than any other camera with a 28-200mm lense & 7.2MP res. that i've seen. The zoom works very well, but is somewhat agressive. The resolution is great in well lit areas. However, when in low lit situations, it can suffer some shutter lag. Also when taking pictures in dark rooms, the flash can cause overexposure at close range, but that seems to be pretty standard with many cameras. The camera has one unique feature that really impressed me. If taking a picture of a painting or document at any angle or distance, you can select the "Skew Correction" and the camera will automatically select the picture/document and stretch it to fit the screen exactly. It works fenominally. I am not a camera guru so i cannot answer your question in regards to shutter speed, but i dont believe that is an option. The image stabilization seems to be par with equally priced cameras on the market. Battery life could actually be as stated on their website, i.e. 330 pics per charge. I used the camera on two trips (3 weeks apart) and took well over 100 pictures & 10+ videos on one charge. One drawback while taking a video is that you only have the option to zoom digitally. All in all I have been very satisfied with the camera and am happy i made the purchase. You might want to go to the Ricoh website to read info on the specs regarding other features. http://www.ricoh.com/r_dc/caplio/r6/

Most photos taken with the R6 greatly benefit from post processing. A simple freeware program like Ifranview can make a world of difference by simply pressing Shift-U (auto color works very very well) and Shift-S to sharpen. Low lights can be tweaked by pressing Shift-G and adjusting gamma/contrast to taste. Properly post processed images can turn out rather exceptional to printing @ 20x15.

The R6 is as good as any other compact, even the fuji F30 which has its own set of quarks like under exposure in bright landscapes (to prevent blowing out highlights in low light).

If money is no object the Ricoh GR is by far the finest wide angle compact there is.