Ricoh Caplio GX8 Digital Camera

This model, the GX8, is near impossible to buy in the United States, but I found a good source on eBay for $439 and it was delivered from Japan in only 2 1/2 days! Yes the camera screen in all in English, or if you want, a bunch of other languages.

The GX8 Camera:
A nice build quality that matches my previous Ricoh G1-35 mm film camera that came with a German made Piedersen lens, however the GX8 appears to have either dispensed with the Piedersen or simply had their own name imprinted. Either way the lens is yielding spectacular results. Printing crystal clear 8.5 by 11 inch prints in no problem.

Ease of use:
This camera is very simple. Ita s 8.1 megapixel resolution is spectacular! Low on nested display menus which is a strong benefit to this user, and strong on externally mounted buttons that are easy to operate and for which I found quickly made adjustments as I needed of the GX8. It appears that easy and simple were two guidelines for Ricoh as they designed this camera and that has benefits and detractions. The detractions include only six pre-set scene configurations: 1) High sensitivity for a dark placesa , 2) Text mode for shooting the printed content of books a great for spys and for rendering everything in black and white, 3) Nightscape, 4) Landscape for outside daytime, 5) Sports for high speed capture 6) portrait which a blurs background nicelya . These settings are quickly adjustable with an easy rotation of the top mounted dial to a Scenea which is one of seven positions and then selecting from a highly readable menu on the display.

The GX8 is ready for the first shot in an incredibly short time after turning on the camera; about a second and a half or less! This makes it one of the fastest digital cameras on the market. The zoom lens is controllable from a rocker switch just below the top right side of the GX8 where the thumb can readily manipulate it.

This camera does not use expensive exotic shaped batteries. Instead Ricoh chose to use regular AA batteries, so life if simple.



External Software:
Installed the software, called Ricoh Gate, for importing from camera to Windows XP, on a Sony lap top. This software is the Achilles Heal of the product. Luckily there are free or very inexpensive ($9.95) software from software995.com called PhotoEdit that does a great job. The Ricoh software is very plain and simple but it worked okay at least initially and then ceased invoking automatically when the camera was attached to the compuer. I have switched to Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard for importing images and ita s much more to the point than the software called Ricoh Gate. Also installed the Ricoh software on a second computer, a faster Dell Windows XP laptop, but was unable to get the Ricoh software to recognize the camera at all. I know the computer sees the camera as it audibly acknowledges ita s connection and disconnection. The Ricoh Gate software was blind to the camera with messages indicating that there was no camera connected even though it was. Oddly, both computers had service pack 2, so am uncertain for the discrepancy at this time.

On the faster Dell laptop, as an alternative to Ricoh Gate, I fired up Adobe Elements which, though it does not see a WIA connected device, does indeed see the camera and imports JPEG images into Elements using the import setting for a a video framea where I was able to save and manipulate the images. The Microsoft Scanner And Camera software worked the best and that is what I am using now. It imports all of the Ricoh GX8a s images automatically and is a pleasure to use (thank you Microsoft).

The bottom line:
The image quality is supreme printing out on a Canon Pixma 4000R printer. The camera is quite easy to use and the controls are fairly intuitive without a manual. Very nice camera, very nice lens. Purists will say there is no a RAWa image format, but I have found the JPEG to be fabulous. It also has larger TIFF but I have not used that much yet. Ricoh does a solid job.