A few words on the Ricoh GR1s

My camera of choice is a Leica M6, but as it seems the legendary Leica quality went into someone elses M6, mine had been in for service for ages. With summer holidays and travel coming up I wanted another camera to use while the M6 was in the shop, and figured a good compact camera would be a nice compromise between usability and cost.

I’ve also also owned the digital Ricoh GR, which I really believe is a great compact camera, and given all the great reviews of the film versions of the GR line it felt quite natural to try one out.

In use

The finder is fairly small, but it’s fully usable and fulfills its purpose nicely. It shows frame lines which are somewhat inaccurate, and it has a basic parallax compensation frame that shows up at close distances. It will also show an icon that symbolizes the distance at which is has focused and of course the shutter speed it has selected. The shutter speed blinks to indicate risk for camera shake or over exposure and so on, but those specifics are pretty uninteresting until you actually buy and start using this kind of camera.

In general, this is a really nice to use compact film camera. It’s always nice with good optics and so on, but usability is really the most important for me, and the Ricoh GR1s, like has been said many times before, really is nice to use. It will also physically move the lens when you half press the shutter button, and not when you actually full press. That might sound like a small thing, but it greatly reduces the effective shutter lag and can make quite a difference for timing your shots.

As far as compact cameras in general go, they aren’t really my thing, there is something with them that I can’t quite put my finger or that I can’t get along with fully. I think it is a general lack of feeling that you are in control that gets to me.

However, as a light weight film camera for when you want ease of use, it really fits the bill and it really delivers great results in the end. Some cheap people might even love that it consistently fits 37 frames into a 36 frame roll — personally it annoys the hell out of me as it is so weird when I cut the roll into strips. It is possible to rewind the roll at 36 frames, but who remembers to do that?

It also takes the film “upside down”, like the Olympus mju:ii, but on top of that it also shoots it backwards. What I mean is that it winds all the film into the camera on load, and then winds it back into the canister as you shoot (the Hasselblad Xpan also does this for example). The upside of that is that when you get really drunk and open the back in the middle of a roll, your exposed frames are safely tucked away inside the canister already.

The biggest downside is that with certain scanners that scans whole rolls, you essentially get the photos upside down and backwards. Not a huge issue, but a bit annoying. I’d imagine this would happen if you were to have your roll lab scanned for example.

My conclusion after using the GR1s is that if you are into compact cameras, then this camera is a really good choice. But if you like to fiddle with manual control and things, then don’t get a compact camera at all. These kinds of cameras just don’t lend themselves very well to precise control in my opinion. The picture quality you get from this camera is however great.

Features and such

As has been described in multiple places, the GR1s is to be considered a “high end compact camera”. I’m not totally sure what that really means, but my interpretation is that it means high build quality, great lens and features that might not naturally exist on cheaper cameras. And of course, it is way more expensive than the Olympus mju:ii for example.

These high end features can mean somewhat different things depending on context I would guess, but in the specific case of the Ricoh GR1s I would say they are the metal body, the sharp f/2.8 lens and the additional focus modes.

The camera has a full auto mode, or a so called “program mode”. I am not really sure about the difference in this case — you set it to “P” and you let it decide what to do basically, with no way to alter that decision. It might be trying to do some smart adjustments of exposure in this mode, but I don’t really know. As we are talking about a compact camera here, the “P” mode is how I use it most of the time.

However, there are occasions where it is really nice to be able to move it from program mode to a specific aperture by setting it on a little dial that is easily accessible with your right thumb while holding the camera. Essentially this sets the camera to aperture priority mode, which means it will decide the shutter speed for you to get a proper exposure at your selected aperture. This does open up for a little bit of creative control.

Now, the GR1s has a 28mm lens, so it’s not like you’re going to end up with a “bokeh-fest” just because you open up the aperture as much as possible. But you certainly can get a bit of background blur at closer distances with the aperture set to the max of f/2.8.

The lens

So while on the topic of the lens, all I can really say that means anything is that I find it really good. With that I mean that I find it sharp enough with nice contrast and flare resistance. Perhaps there are those that would buy a compact camera in their pursuit of the technically perfect image, but I am not one of those — my opinion is that if you want ultimate sharpness then shoot digital, or at least larger format film.

So that being said, the lens of the GR1s is really good, that is really all there is to it. If there was one thing I’d dream about it would be f/2 instead of f/2.8 as the max aperture. I can also see how some people would find the lens to deliver just a tiny bit too much contrast as well, but I think it is somewhat a non issue given all other variables like film development and scanning (or wet printing) — it’s a matter of taste really in practice.

Auto focus modes

I think really the only thing that bothers me somewhat in actual use when it comes to this camera is that it is not possible to split focus lock from exposure lock. This basically means that like a lot of other cameras, you point it at something, half press the shutter, and it will try to auto focus and set exposure at once. So in theory it can be problematic if whatever you want to focus on is either very dark or very bright, but in reality it is not really a problem I have suffered from — it might very well psychological. Anyway I thought it was worth mentioning.

There is a standard focus mode, which basically has three points it tries to use when focusing, then there is a spot focus mode as well which disables the outer two points for more precise control. I tend to use spot focus most of the time, but I have found that the camera can be a bit crap at finding focus in that mode. It misses just enough for it to be somewhat annoying to be honest.

On top of that there is also the (as far as I know) Ricoh specific “snap focus” mode. This mode really is a type of pre-/zonefocus thing where the camera pre-focuses to a set distance. I think this distance is the hyperfocal distance at f/16 or something, never really looked into it. It’s really good for some kinds of street shooting, especially as it removes the focus time, so the shutter lags becomes more or less zero.

In the case of the GR1s the snap focus distance cannot be set manually, as it can on the digital GR (and GR1v as far as I understand). However, there is a manual focus setting, which kind of is the same thing as the snap mode, but it lets you focus on a certain distance first, and it will use that.

With the snap and manual focus modes you can in a sense split focus lock and exposure lock, but it’s not a real solution in my opinion. You do however get the effect of separate focus and exposure locks this way.

Lastly there is a focus mode that puts the lens at infinity focus which I use quite a bit whenever I need to make sure it will focus really far away.