So this post is going to be one of those geeky excursions into gadgetland – specifically, into the world of the new spiffy camera I bought for my birthday. I’ve been looking for a ‘run-around’ camera – when I don’t want to be bothered by the full Canon 5D and complement of lenses, but just want something close at hand to capture the kids, the world around me, that fits in my pocket, has enough pro features to keep me happy, etc. I selected the Ricoh GX100, a very pocketable, RAW-shooting, zoom-lens rangefinder.

There are a number of entries in the somewhat arcane ‘rangefinder-like’ prosumer point-and-shoot category. These are basically digicams trying to behave sort of like the Leica M-series film cameras of old, for those of us who don’t quite bring in the mon-ay to afford the $5k price tag for the Leica M8 – without a lens. The cameras I looked at all have street prices between $500 and $700 – so they are not toys by any means. Leica has their D-Lux 3, Sigma produces the impressive new DP-1 (with the unusual Foveon sensor), and Ricoh has a couple of entries – the multi-focal-length GX1000 and the fixed-lens GRs. None of these (until you hit the stratospheric M8 class) have truly interchangeable lenses – but the GX has a lovely 24-72 f/2.5-4.4. Wide enough to provide visuals rarely seen on a point-and-shoot – and an aperture range that allows (along with the hardware anti-shake feature) to grab images you might not be able to capture otherwise. The other key feature here was that the camera can capture in RAW format – in this case, the pretty-much universal DNG or digital negative. That makes post-processing a breeze in Lightroom. I’m very happy with this little gem so far. I’m not thrilled with the electronic viewfinder the kit came with – I’m going to be looking into some spiffy Voigtlander optical viewfinders a lot of enthusiasts say work well with the GX100.

Here is a gallery of some other images I’ve captured in these first few days.