In good light the image quality of the Ricoh GRIII is as good as you could want in a camera that you can just slip into your pocket.
That image quality comes from the camera having an APS-C sensor, which is much bigger than you find in almost all small cameras.
It’s the same size sensor in the Fuji X line of cameras or any of the smaller Nikons, Canons, or Sony cameras.
But those ‘smaller’ cameras are much bigger and heavier than the Ricoh.
The downsides of the Ricoh is that it doesn’t have a viewfinder. So then how do you focus? How do you make sure the thing in the scene that you want to focus on, is in focus?
Well, the Ricoh is helped by three things. It has a wide 28mm lens, which means it is easier to get a full depth of field than with a long focal length lens.
You can see that in this photo, where the woman on the left and the van on the right are both in focus despite the van being further back in the scene.
The second thing that helps is that it has eye-tracking autofocus. Tell the camera to lock onto an eye or a face and it will do so instantly. So then I don’t have to worry it will choose to lock onto that street sign or the buildings in the background.
The third thing that helps the Ricoh nail shots is that it has in-body image stabilisation (IBIS), which means I can avoid shake even with slow shutter speeds.
Slow shutter speeds help with still subjects, but these people were moving, so I needed a higher, faster shutter speed. And I didn’t need a slow shutter speed with this shot because it was a bright sunny day and I shot at ISO 800.
The EXIF data attached to the file tells me I shot at 1/1000th of. a second at f4.5 and ISO 800.
And that is the final part of the puzzle. I could crank up the ISO from its native ISO 100 to ISO 800 and still get good image quality because the sensor is big.
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