Ricoh's new R10 replaces the earlier R8, and brings a few new features along with it, the most promising of which is a screen which has grown from 2.7 to 3 inches is, preserving its excellent 460, 000 pixel resolution along the way.

On paper, at least, the R10 is a very promising camera indeed, including a 28-200 mm zoom lens and plenty of image stabilization.

But do the photos it takes match up to its excellent specification?

Handling

Although perfectly solid and pleasing to the eye, the case of the R10 is a little too smooth, meaning it's quite hard to a good grip on it.

The bump at the edge of the case, designed to improve your grip on the compact, isn't really a suitable shape either.

Ricoh haven't really innovated much with the interface--a handy joystick control is used to navigate through the menus as well as accessing common functions directly.

With just one press, you can have instant access to any five settings of your choice.

Even without programming your own shortcuts, getting your head round the settings is easy enough, and a click wheel on the top allows you to choose between automatic and manual modes and so on.

As with the joystick, you can also program two of the settings on this dial yourself.

Interestingly, the R10 has three different photo formats: the usual 4:3 and 3:2 aspect ratios are accompanied by a square (1:1) frame which is fun for rather old-school portraits, but, obviously, less useful for landscapes.

The speeds the R10 delivers are hardly worth shouting about.

In our studio, where the controlled light levels are low, autofocus took 1.4 seconds for wide angle shots, and 1.8 seconds when the subject was three meters away from the lens.

In brighter light, things speed up a little and the R10 managed to autofocus in under a second.
Burst mode clocks in at 1.6 frames per second, which, while acceptable, is nothing to write home about.

The 3'' LCD screen is a pleasure to use, and moving subjects are generally fluid, although ghosting is sometimes evident. 

Thanks to an anti-glare coating, the screen works even in bright sunlight, and it has very wide viewing angles, which is rather unusual for a compact.

One cute feature is the inclusion of an electronic spirit level which allows you to steady your shot.

It's fun, as well as useful, and it would be great to have on other digital cameras.

Although all of these clever extras are attractive, the quality of the photos that we took with the R10 was sadly disappointing.

Ricoh has gained something of a bad reputation for building very useful cameras that take poor photos, and the R10 does nothing to buck this trend.

Even with the slowest film speeds, electronic noise is visible at full size, and above 400 ISO it becomes problematic. 

At 800 ISO, color pixels are visible where there should just be black and white when photos are viewed on a computer monitor or printed on A4 paper.

We can only advise you to save 1600 ISO for special cases, and bear in mind that even then it will need a little postprocessing afterwards.

Having said that, the lens gives generally useable results, without suffering too much from distortion towards the edge of the frame, unlike some of the competition.

More alarming in the case of the R10 is the presence of purple fringing in zones with a lot of contrast.

A macro mode at 1 cm is a good addition, and results are equally good (or bad) whether the white balancing is considered inside or out.

A final disappointment--by no means unique to the R10, or even Ricoh--is the fact that video is recorded in VGA rather than HD.

What is reproachable, though, is the poor quality of both audio and video streams brought about by over-aggressive compression.