At the moment I’m posting this Ricoh GRIIIx review, I have only about 50-80 views on each post and 10 subscribers. So, of course, this post is not paid and it’s my own opinion about the camera!
A couple of months ago I bought a new camera and that’s Ricoh GRIIIx.
I remember, years ago, I liked when my gear looked serious. Back then, the serious gear in my opinion meant to be big. Right now I enjoy having the pocketable Ricoh GRIIIx and don’t care if it looks professional or not.
The camera I wanted when I was a beginner
I remember I wanted a powerful camera and I wanted the maximum performance I could get. I also didn’t have any photography orders and tried to do all kinds of photoshoots. For that, I searched for a camera that can allow me to do anything. And I bought a zoom lens (Prime lenses are better). And I wanted a camera that will allow me to use a very high ISO, so I could come to an event indoors and shoot with 4000-6400ISO and still have good quality.
I did care about the dynamic range too. Later I realised that Sony A7 has all of these qualities but it’s relatively small. It’s, of course, better since it’s lighter to carry with me. I still had some big lenses for that camera and always had to carry a backpack with me only for the camera.
So I bought Sony A7R and it’s a nice camera but not pocketable. Sometimes I don’t want to take a heavy backpack with me to take some photos.
My struggles with heavy cameras
In a few years, I lost interest in simply taking pictures of the streets. Often I could take the camera and walk with it for the whole day without taking a single shot. But sometimes I left the camera at home. It was frustrating when I saw something very beautiful without being able to photograph it. Many times I carried it without any reason. Sometimes I needed the camera so much but didn’t have it with me.
“the best camera is the one you have with you” – there is a book by Chase Jarvis called like that.
How I decided to buy Ricoh GRIIIX
I used to like a big dynamic range. It’s good for sure since you can capture more information but it’s not necessary for subject-based artistic photography. Low key photography is the case. You don’t need to capture all of the light to convey your idea. I realised it when I learned photography better. I started making less of mistakes when taking pictures and I didn’t need to fix them in post-processing. Because of that, I didn’t need to have a wider dynamic range. A different quality of the camera became more important – the size.
Sony A7R is already relatively small but there’s no pancake lens for it, so it’s impossible to put it in your pocket. Since I used only full-frame cameras for some years, I didn’t want to get a camera with a cropped sensor (even though Ricoh GRIIIx has a quite large APS-C sensor).
I searched for all available compact full-frame in 2022 but they all weren’t compact enough. And then I found Ricoh. For some time, I wasn’t sure about buying it but later realised that it will be the best performance I can have in such a small body and I bought it. I liked it a lot and that’s why I decided to write this Ricoh GRIIIx review. Read below my experience with it!
Ricoh GRIIIx Review: My Experience
It’s a nice and very lightweight camera which is smaller than my phone, it has all of the options of the professional camera and you can do any sort of photos with it. It has a prime 40mm(full-frame equivalent) lens. And the colours and dynamic range on it are very good.
I took this camera on different walks and did a street fashion photoshoot on it and the results were very nice. The pictures were even published in a few magazines, so the quality of the images is good enough for a print (24 megapixels).
I included the raw file and the retouched version to show you the camera abilities and the importance of photo editing
Ricoh GRIIIx Review: Jpeg
One time I accidentally switched to Jpeg format and didn’t notice it and unfortunately some of the photographs turned out much worse than I wanted (the colours weren’t editable and were very dirty in the shadows) but I kind of fixed it in photoshop. So today’s lesson: “Never switch to Jpeg, especially on cropped formats”.
Overall, it’s a great camera and it serves well for any purpose.
For example, I used it in the evenings. Since it has f2.8 and built-in stabilisation and is very lightweight, it’s easy to keep it still in your hands and take photos with a shutter speed of up to ~ ¼ of a second. This way I’m able to take pictures on this camera at night and keep using a very low ISO.
Ricoh GRIIIx Review: More Examples
Ricoh GRIIIx Review – Update 08.12.2022
I have been using this camera for almost a year now and it’s sincerely amusing when people think that Ricoh is an inexpensive low-grade amateur camera. I genuinely love that people outside of photo society don’t take it seriously because of its size.
That means that one of the main features of the camera works perfectly. I can take pictures of anything/anyone without bringing attention to myself. Now I would like to get another Ricoh GRIIIx since we originally bought this one for my wife and I can’t use it every day, I still have to carry a 5kg backpack to take a camera with me))).
The glitches I experienced over time
A few times the camera could not switch on and the screen went green(I never really dropped it aside from ~2 times from about 30-50cm height. This happened but super rarely and after taking out the battery and putting it back in the camera worked perfectly. My sony glitches too from time to time so I guess the cameras can glitch and it’s irritating but it is the way it is.
The Best camera is the one you have with you.
So in a conclusion, I want to say that it’s really important to keep taking photos if you want to learn photography. It’s better to have a bit lower quality but take a hundred pictures a day than to have the highest quality and take your huge and heavy camera with you only once a month. Ricoh GRIIIx is a great camera and I feel like I can do absolutely anything with that. There’s no need for extra features for the type of photography I do.
I hope you found this Ricoh GRIIIx review helpful. If you did, please consider subscribing to my newsletter which will help you to improve your photography skills. In the newsletter, I send notifications about new posts and photography tutorials and sometimes updates about my photography projects.
pin this post for later
Hover on your preferred image to see the red “Save it” button with a Pinterest logo. Clicking on it will open a new tab to pin this blog post to one of your boards.
