Review: Ricoh Caplio R5 digital camera

With the 35mm equivalent of a 28-200mm zoom lens, the Caplio R5 is a truly versatile camera suitable for shooting a wide range of subjects.

It’s reasonably compact 7megapixel camera and has some subtle design touches, but it’s far from the most stylish camera we’ve seen. Our review sample had a silver body, but it’s also available in both black and red versions, which are a little more eye-catching.

The Ricoh’s solid, but lightweight construction doesn’t have the expensive feel some may be after, but it’s practical and robust. It’s also large enough to be comfortable to hold in your hands rather than between your fingertips. Unfortunately, the lens cover slides open very easily and therefore doesn’t afford as much protection as we would like.

As is usual for cameras of this size, the battery compartment on the underside of the camera houses both a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery and a slot for an SD memory card. No SD card is provided to bolster the 26MB of internal memory.

The long lens extends and retracts noisily, with an almost clockwork whirr – it’s certainly not good for shooting in environments where silence is required. When turning the camera on the lens takes around a second to extend, by which time the camera is ready to shoot your first photo.

The menus are navigated by a four-way cursor control. In normal mode it also gives direct access to flash and macro settings, while in scene mode it opens up a menu of ten shooting modes including two user-configurable memory settings.

Some cameras go too far when it comes to scene modes. By contrast, the Caplio R5 gives you a short, sensible selection to choose from; portrait, sports, landscape and nightscape cover the most commonly used shots.

The remainder allow you to correct images taken at an angle, capture text, combine macro shots with digital zoom or enter a low-light shooting mode that boosts the visibility of the LCD screen in dark conditions.

The main menu system is quite slow to navigate and disables the viewfinder image, but the inclusion of a programmable adjustment button places your most frequently used settings at your fingertips during shooting. Pressing the button brings up a row of icons, the contents of which can be chosen by you to allow quick access to the functions you use most.

For example, there’s no dedicated button for ISO adjustment, but adding the ISO function to the adjustment button lets you access the relevant menu in just a couple of button presses. This single feature is a huge boost to usability, making the Caplio R5 both quick and agile; having all your favourite controls on a single button means you’ll seldom have to examine the back of the camera for your chosen control.

The Caplio R5’s support for ISO settings up to 1600 looks impressive on paper, but at the highest setting a large amount of noise is apparent. At more reasonable settings of ISO 400 and below, images are clean and sharp right out to the edges of the frame. There was also a distinct lack of chromatic aberration.

Somewhat more useful than an ISO 1600 setting is the Caplio R5's anti-vibration system. When activated, we found it transformed what would otherwise be an unusable blurry shot into a perfectly crisp photo. This was especially effective when using the full extent of the camera's 7.1x zoom.

Overall, we were pleasantly surprised with most of what this camera has to offer – it’s just a shame the look and feel isn’t as impressive as the pictures it produces.

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Canon Ixus 900 Ti
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