Product Reviews

Long in the shadow of other conventional camera makers, Ricoh is fighting back strongly with its digital offerings. Its earlier designs were distinguished by a unique form: a palm top with a flip-up lid. The latest, one of an ever growing number of 2.3-megapixel cameras, returns to the standard compact camera shape.

You hold it just like any other conventional camera. The markings are clear, the menus self-explanatory and the interface clean - if not utterly utilitarian - so with a little bit of application you'll be using the camera in no time.

Dull in interface and in shape, the Ricoh's styling has none of the elegance and sweep of, say, an Olympus, and lacks the love-it-or-hate-it flair of Fuji's cameras.

A retractable zoom lens with 50mm equivalent focal lengths of 38mm-86mm (8mm-20mm actual), shutter-like covers and a flash-tube are the main items up front. The lens is said to offer very high resolution and uses four aspherical lenses (meaning the curvature of at least one face is not part of a sphere). The spartan viewfinder is adequately bright and large, zooming in step with the lens. The finder design is also surprisingly complex, with two prisms used to lengthen the light path.

A large, 1.8in LCD screen takes up much of the back. Ricoh obviously has a thing about keeping LCD screens clean: this one has a sliding cover that doubles as the main power switch (booting up takes about 7 seconds). There are buttons for controlling the LCD, calling up the menu and selecting items. A sharply knurled mode selector, which is for choosing setup, shooting, reviewing, erasing, and connecting with the computer, is angled for the right-hand thumb, and the lens zoom buttons - which double as up/down buttons for the menu - are nearby. A row of buttons select picture size or compression (either 1792 x 1200 pixels or 896 x 600 each at three different compression levels), self-timer

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and flash. One of the joys of this camera is the shutter button, which works with a distinct and audible release point - a great improvement on the feeble clicks that usually pass for shutter releases.

The main reason you can use it from the moment you pop in four AA batteries is the munificent standard RAM of 8Mb. This will hold up to nine images at best quality, and up to 99 at a quarter of the full size and the highest compression quality. To supplement this, you can slip SmartMedia cards into a slot which is wired to take the full range of cards: a 32Mb card holds about 39 images at highest quality (about 795K per image). Writing an image at the top quality setting takes about 6 seconds.

Its picture quality wipes the floor with some £8000 digital cameras we've tested, and is well up with its competitors. Although images are not subjectively as crisp as the Nikon Coolpix 950, it has a few more pixels to work with (see sidebar). Resolution is high enough to capture enough of the fine detail in a shirt or carpet for you to feel you're not being fobbed off with a load of artefacts masquerading as filigree. Auto-focus accuracy (reaching down to 4cm) appears good thanks to stepless adjustment through its passive through-the-lens system. In low light, colour saturation suffered, but that was easily fixed with equalisation. The image quality is good enough for anything from a quarter-page at superior magazine quality to a half-page or even more of average reproduction. A pat on Ricoh's back is due for the slip-on lens hood: it looks like an afterthought, but at least they thought of it.

Enough software is provided on a single CD to make this a standalone buy: we shall ignore the fact that Windows users get a bundle of five ArcSoft applications. Mac users get the PhotoStudio 3 for image editing and PhotoBase for cataloguing. For downloading, a TWAIN driver and manager is supplied: you have to ignore the poor installation instructions and copy both driver and manager into both the Import/Export folder in Plug-ins and into a new folder in Preferences. The camera comes with a USB lead but a driver was not provided with the review camera (it's promised for the final release). The bare-bones Camera Utility worked fine: copying ten images down the serial (modem) port took 15 minutes, working nominally at 115200bit/sec.

The Ricoh RDC-5000 is a highly competent camera at a fair price, but it's a pity it's indistinguishable from the crowd of conventional compact cameras.