Over the years, life found me leaving my camera at home more and more. Then one day I decided that I just had to get back into photography and since it was the 90s, I decided to reject most of my luddite inclinations and go digital.
My simplistic thought at the time was that digital was all about the megapixels (somewhat like the promise of perfect sound forever in the days of the first audio CDs). So, off I went to Costco and bought their very finest point and shoot, the Minolta DiMage F100 (a brand fondly recalled from the days of my XG-7 and even earlier my SRT-201). The brick-shaped Minolta was a 4MP camera and it struck me as slow and unresponsive. The images, though, were quite lovely. Since I’d never owned a camera with AF I found myself with a greater sense of assurance when it came to composition. It felt that that little silver brick let me be more of a photographer and less of a camera operator.
Oh, yeah, for a while maybe…but there had to be something better, surely. The new cameras soon had way more MP and more was surely better, or so I thought. I Ebayed the silver brick and bought myself a Nikon P5100. I wasn’t even smart enough to know what I’d given up. For the next year I struggled with the lack of a certain organic quality with the images that the Nikon captured. They weren’t bad, but they didn’t make me recall the scenes the way the silver brick had. The P5100 was the first camera to make me think that perhaps MP were not all that you needed to have to a good digital camera and that was a rather disquieting thought, to be honest.
That’s when I made my biggest mistake, albeit one that provides ongoing amusement. I began to lurk at photography sites on the Internet. Now, of course, enthusiast sites are all pretty much all the same. They’re inhabited by a bunch of generally well meaning people who by and large know less than they say they know (myself included) and who very likely spend more time on the internet cyber-talking about their passion than actually expressing their passion.
By this time, I had bought my first DSLR, a Canon XS, and quickly acquired a handful of lenses. I love that rig, but all those years of either no camera or a point & shoot made that camera, one of the smallest and lightest DSLRs on the market, seem burdensome and ungainly. There had to be a point & shoot that filled my needs so I decided to try a number of them, most acquired used so that I could minimize the cost of my study, and see if I could find the perfect point & shoot.
The Canon G10 was my first target, and I had to buy one new. I got mine at Circuit City right before they went tennis-up, and I even used a $50 off coupon to sweeten the deal. The G10 is a fascinating product and a superb camera. It presents this attractive blend of old and new that just makes it fun to use. Also, it has a somewhat serious countenance to it. I’ve not used or felt another point & shoot that was its rival in that regard. On the other hand, the G10 is simply too bulky, too un-pocketable, for a DSLR stand-in camera. That said, if I could only own one camera it would be a G10. It simply does so many things well, and produces such solid images, that in cannot be ignored as a serious camera.
After that, I stayed in the Canon realm but went downsize and bought a Canon SD880. Yes, I confess (readily even) that I bought the SD880 largely on the strength of Ken Rockwell’s rave-review of it. The little fella (the 880, not Rockwell) is really a fine camera. Its big 3” LCD made using it outdoors pretty easy, even without an optical viewfinder. But, the real problem with that it was both too small and fumbly and my right thumb always wanted to rest right on top of the mode wheel so I found myself constantly (though unintentionally) toggling between P and A modes.
I cannot recall why I bought a used Sony CyberShot W50 from Adorama (a store I strongly dislike). Maybe my PayPal account was flush, or maybe I was just bored. Anyway, for $60 I bought this little gem with no expectations whatsoever. When it arrived I was immediately struck by just how small yet non-fumbly it was. The W50 is easily held and shot in one hand without fear of executing the very sad point & shoot toss. Even better, the images were quite good and the Sony user interface was superb, easily the best I’ve used. This was truly a camera that could be used without an instruction manual. The W50 only had 6MP, but they were clean MPs, and created very natural colors. The little Sony was betrayed by its slightly too narrow zoom. Both the G10 and the SD880 had led to my addiction to a wider lens.
I did a very brief catch and release on a nifty, black Leica C-Lux 2 but it was so, so, so small and fumbly that it was on its way out before I even had a chance to get to know it. That said, I did find the very few photos that I did take with it to be somewhat watery and soft. But, that got me thinking about a Panasonic Lumix LX3.
The LX3 looked promising, but that funky removable lens cap made it look silly and full of pretense. Even worse, they were (and are) next to impossible to find on the used market and the idea of paying over retail is anathema to my study. So, I decided to see if I could get the flavor of the LX3 by grabbing a used LX2. I quickly found a perfect used copy on Ebay and within a couple days it was on my porch.
I don’t know how much of the heavy lifting in the Lumix series was done by Leica and how much by Panasonic but I can attest to the fact that they know how to build a really fine and sensible camera. The controls are clean and business-like. There’s no sense of electronic clutter. The buttons and slider switches are a joy to use and I just loved its 16:9 aspect ratio. Still, the LX2 is oddly bulky. It’s really only a little more pocket-friendly than the girthy G10. Worst of all is that kludgy looking and feeling lens cap. You’d think that a DSLR user would be used to a lens cap, but we know when we have a point and shoot in our hands and we know that point and shoots have automatic lens caps. The pop-up flash I could live with, the controls I loved, the optics I respected but that goofy lens cap was a deal killer.
Now, I have to confess that the winner of the study and the camera that I’m going to talk about now first found its way into my hands somewhere after the G10 and before the LX2. It is, at least for me, the ultimate point and shoot...the Ricoh GRD II. I had demoed one a while back and its uniqueness really threw me off. So, when the time came to send it back (or have the dealer send me a new one) I rather just hung back and thought about it before I made my decision.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with it, the Ricoh GRD II is a fixed lens point and shoot with an equivalent 28mm lens with a maximum aperture of f 2.8. It is a visually understated camera. There are no loud graphics to announce it, just a purposeful look. Once you pick up a GRD II it not only fits easily in the hand, but much of its body is clad in a synthetic material that strikes the perfect balance of smoothness and tack. It is as slim as the Canon SD880 but slightly longer and has more open real estate on the back for your fingers. If you’re a thrill seeker you could use it without the wrist strap and shoot one handed for a very long time without a handling mishap.
Before I tried it, I was dubious about the fixed lens but now I see its glory clearly. Frankly, you don’t need a zoom lens in a point and shoot even though everyone wants one. Why? Because the relative lack of the ability to create a shallow DOF image makes a foot zoom preferable in a point and shoot. A few steps this way, or a few that way and I have composed the shot just the way I want with a 28mm lens. If I want to crop the image later, it’s no problem. For the most part, I’m not thinking DOF with a point and shoot unless I am coaxing it into action as a portrait or people shooter out of desperation. In that case, I can only hope that f 2.8 is fast enough to get the results I want.
Still, if all the GRD II had was good handling and a fixed lens it might not be enough to earn its title, but it also has clever functional features like a level indicator that works when the camera is held both vertically and horizontally. There’s also the GRD’s slick way that it encourages user control (most notably with its two user-defined My Settings mode) and simplicity through the logical layout of its controls and use of its two Adjust wheels. It simply looks and feels like camera that was designed to be used rather than merely marketed.
The images that come out of the Ricoh are impressive. They have a photojournalistic quality to them, some have called it gritty. Colors are well saturated but also organic. Images are never overblown the way some point and shoot images can be. The greens and blues (and I know I am being overly simplistic here) are especially good.
As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you. The Ricoh GRD II is the best point and shoot camera for me because I know that it’s the one that I am most likely to have with me and that is the most enjoyable to use.
Long live the king.
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