Introduction

Design & Appearance

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At first glance, the GR Digital IV looks like more of a toy than its price tag and spec sheet suggests. The unassuming front panel looks like it belongs to a 2004-era Canon Powershot, thanks to a shiny finish and a big, textured grip.

Peek around the sides, though, at it starts to look more like the serious compact that it really is. The hot shoe, front-mounted jog dial, locking mode dial, and customizable function keys give it away as an enthusiast-oriented competitor to pocket powerhouses like the Canon S100 and Olympus XZ-1. It also has an unconventional quick-menu controller, the Adj. knob.

Tour

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Ease of Use

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Ease of use is a subjective term. The GR Digital IV is designed for enthusiast photographers, and they'll probably find that the handful of external and customizable controls are helpful. In our few minutes with it on the showroom floor, we were able to get the hang of it pretty quickly, with only the Adj. knob causing a bit of confusion at first. On the other hand, this is not the right camera for novice shooters.

The menu system is all function and very little form. It has all the design finesse of a bunch of MS DOS command lines, but it works just fine. It's a three-tiered layout, one section each for shooting, setup, and control customization. It's all easy to navigate, too, since Ricoh did their best to leave no pixel unused, cramming no less than 10 options onto each page. The quick menu system is easier on the eyes, since it's overlaid on the LCD live view. The GRD IV also has a few customizable hot keys, so that should cut down on time spent in the menu system.

Size & Handling

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Like most advanced compacts, the GRD IV is a bit larger than a low-cost pocket point-and-shoot, in the same ballpark as the Canon S100, Panasonic LX5, or Olympus XZ-1. Thanks to a very low body weight and a big, comfy, textured grip, it's much easier to handle that any of those cameras. There are enough external controls (a jog dial, adjustment knob, four-way pad, and two assignable function buttons) to keep the button layout pretty streamlined without hurting the usability. It's small enough to fit easily into a jacket pocket, handy for toting around anywhere.

Auto Mode

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Auto mode on the GR Digital IV is pretty straightforward, no fuss, no muss. It's the green camera setting on the mode dial.

Movie Mode

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Movie mode is an afterthought with this camera. Yes, it can shoot video clips, but only in standard def, and without much manual control.

Custom Image Presets

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The mode dial hosts three customizable shooting mode presents, marked as MY1 through MY3.

Drive/Burst Mode

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Ricoh claims that the GRD IV can crank out up to 1.54 frames per second in continuous mode, with no maximum number of shots. That's a respectable figure for a camera with a pokey CCD sensor, and not far behind the output of most advanced-compact competitors.

Other Modes

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The GRD IV offers Program Shift, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, and Full Manual shooting modes, as well as a small handful of scene presets including Dynamic Range, Skew Correction, and Interval Composite—nothing like the typical portrait or landscape modes that most cameras have, though.

Manual Controls

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As an enthusiast compact, the GR Digital IV offers a decent amount of manual, external controls. For starters, the mode dial is locked in place, so users have to press a post and then move the dial—it requires a little extra work, but keeps the dial from shifting while its pulled in or out of a pocket or bag.

More conventionally, the GRD IV's lone jog dial sits in front of the shutter, where a shooter's index finger is likely to rest. This is used to cycle through shooting settings as well as the menu system. On the rear, there are two assignable function buttons, so users can customize them based on which shooting parameters they'll change the most frequently. There's also a manual flash release, as well as an Adj. knob.

Focus

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Autofocus is said to be one of the chief improvements over the GR Digital III—the GRD IV apparently locks focus more quickly and accurately than its predecessor, even in tough lighting conditions. It uses a traditional through-the-lens contrast detection AF system as well as an external system built with its own set of optics. Combined, they offer a whopping 190 autofocus points (except in macro mode).

AF modes include Multi AF, Spot AF, Subject Tracking, Snap, Infinity, and Macro. Manual focus is also available, though as with most compact cameras, it's more of a novelty than an effective way to compose pictures.

ISO

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The ISO range extends from 80 to 3200 in intervals of 1 or 1/3EV, which is more fine control than most compacts offer.

Aperture & Shutter Speed

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Aperture starts at a nice, wide f/1.9 and can drop to a minimum of f/9. Combined with the slightly over-sized sensor, the GRD IV should be able to capture a shallow depth of field at the brighter end of its aperture range.

The shutter has a maximum speed of 1/2000 sec., and an impressive 3-minute minimum, great news for long-exposure buffs.

White Balance

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A handful of typical white-balance presets are available, including two Auto settings, two incandescent and one fluorescent-lighting options, Outdoors and Cloudy modes, as well as a manual set mode.

Exposure & Metering

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There are a few of the standard metering modes available, including a 256-point multi, center-weighted, and spot metering.

Exposure compensation can be adjusted in steps of 1/3EV from -2EV to +2EV. There's also an auto-bracket function.

Image Stabilization

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The GRD IV has sensor-shift image stabilization.

Picture Quality & Size Options

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Maximum resolution is 10 megapixels at a 4:3 aspect ratio, though it can also capture shots in 16:9 and 3:2 aspect ratios at various resolutions.

RAW image capture is supported, as are two levels of JPEG compression: Fine and Normal.

Picture Effects

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The GRD does not offer any "fun" picture effects or filters, but it does have several built-in color modes, including Standard, Vivid, a few B&W settings, Cross Process, Positive Film, and Bleach Bypass.

LCD

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The GR Digital IV comes equipped with a 3-inch LCD with an impressive 1.23 million pixels, among the highest resolution displays on any compact camera at the moment.

Flash

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A flash pops up from the top-left corner of the camera, controlled by a manual flash release. It's said to be effective to 3 meters or about 10 feet, though we couldn't test that claim on the bright showroom floor at PhotoPlus. Flash compensation is controllable, and there are a few different flash modes, including Red-eye Reduction and Slow Synchro.

Lens & Sensor

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The lens and sensor are two of the GRD IV's main attractions. The lens is a 28mm, f/1.9 glass piece—yes, a fixed focal length. Very few compact cameras roll with non-zoom lenses these days. Not that there's anything wrong with a fixed, wide focal length—there's something charming about "zooming with your feet"—but it's a tough sell when there are more affordable cameras with similarly bright lenses (f/1.8 Olympus XZ-1, to name just one) that can also zoom.

Like those zooming, bright-lens, RAW-shooting serious compacts, the GRD IV is built around a 1/1.7" CCD sensor, slightly over-sized by regular point-and-shot standards. Since it's a CCD, it can't crank out speedy bursts or, in this case, even high-def video.

Jacks, Ports & Plugs

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Behind the plastic door on the right side of the GRD IV, there lie mini-USB and micro-HDMI ports. We're running out of creative ways to write that sentence, since almost every compact camera ships with the same or almost the same port combo.

Battery

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Both AAA and a supplied DB-65 rechargeable lithium-ion battery are supported. The Li-ion unit is CIPA rated for 390 shots per charge. That's a respectable figure, a result of the battery's large physical size (which, in turn, lends itself to the comfortable grip). In a pinch, the GRD IV can also run on 2x AAA batteries, though the spec sheet only promises 30 shots per pair of alkaline cells.

Memory

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No surprises here, the GRD IV records to SD/SDHC media cards, though the spec sheet does not indicate support for the enormous SDXC format.

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Other Hardware

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A hot-shoe accessory port sits atop the GRD IV body, suitable for add-on viewfinders, flashes, or other accessories.

Conclusion

Advanced compact cameras appeal to a niche audience, and Ricoh is a niche brand within that niche market. As a company, they seem to be fine with that distinction. While the rest of the high-end compact market works toward faster burst rates, longer zoom ratios, and better video modes, Ricoh stayed the course, releasing another CCD-based, fixed-focal length, standard-def shooting camera.

The GR Digital IV's chief improvement over it predecessor is an important one—faster and more accurate autofocus is nothing to sneeze at. But it really just serves to make Ricoh fans happy, a subtle but significant update to a camera that they already love. It's light. It's comfortable. It has a different control scheme than other high-end compacts. But the GRD IV could have the best image quality out there—we're not sure, since we only got a few minutes to shoots around with it at the PhotoPlus Expo 2011, though the bright f/1.9 lens and 1/1.7" sensor, as well as an updated JPEG engine, do bode well for its photo performance—and it'll still only appeal to a small subset of an already small group of photographers, most of whom already know whether or not they'll like it.

There's nothing wrong with a niche product, and actually, as the larger camera manufacturers try to out-duel each other, an already-proven specialty product is a safe bet. It's just that as cool and novel as the GRD IV is, we're not sure it does anything that more affordable and more feature-rich cameras can't do better.

Sample Photos

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Specs

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