The Ricoh GR range, GR through to GR III, make excellent street and travel photography cameras. They will fit comfortably in your jeans front pocket and can be kept handy in there without a case ready to shoot when a street photo presents itself. Just remove anything from the pocket that might scratch the camera.

GR

The original GR 18.5mm (28mm equivalent) F2.8 lens is ideal for shooting subjects close up and is very sharp giving good image quality.

As the lens is fixed focal length rather than zoom it is necessary to move more to get the crop you want. Working with a fixed lens is a bit more work but it’s a good discipline to practice and the results from the better quality lens make it worthwhile.

It is good as a general travel camera and will take  very good landscape photos with its 16.2 MP sensor.

The GR camera was used on many of our recent photo trips including the trips to Thailand and Japan.

GR III

Very tempted on release by the GRIII, I ordered one, but it never arrived as was out of stock. So, some time later I made another attempt to get one, and this time it arrived. Trying it out, I was impressed by the still images. The video hasn’t improved much by all accounts so I haven’t used that.

The camera has a larger sensor and better sealing than the earlier models.

Getting the camera setup how I like it has been a bit of a challenge. The focusing is setup now, but the exposure seemed to swing around when moving the camera around. I think I’ve got it better now though. I really want it to work how the GR did, but not sure I’m quite there yet.

I’ve now taken the GRIII on a few photo trips and I’m pretty happy with the results. It has totally replaced the GR for me, and even the reduced battery life hasn’t been a big problem. It just means I need to take a break in the middle of the day, or I could get a second battery. The images look very nice, and I was impressed by the macro setting also when I had a play with that.