Ricoh CX2

For a long time, Ricoh's R series dominated the market for compact cameras with powerful 7x zooms, but in the past two years, almost all of the other big manufacturers have begun to catch up. 

As a response, Ricoh has produced the CX2, its first compact with a 10.7x zoom, with the 35 mm equivalent of 28-300 mm.  Everywhere else, it appears to have inherited the distinctive family traits of its successful predecessors.

Handling

And like its ancestors, the CX2 is an imposing camera.  The metal body is superb, and although it can appear somewhat austere, the quality speaks for itself.  Even small details like the closure of the flap that encloses the battery or the zoom control dial are absolutely exemplary.  The grip is a little better than on the CX1, with a few ridges on the handle, but it's only a very small change.

Unfortunately, the lens itself isn't up to the same standard, with a small--but noticeable--wobble at all focal lengths.  Worse, the lens is loud when zooming and focusing.  Ricoh has wasted the opportunity of changing the lens to include a quieter motor.


The user interface is classic Ricoh: a clickable joystick that rests under the thumb and controls a quick menu (that's entirely customisable), an Fn button that you can attribute to any feature you like, and two personal modes as well as the others (auto, scene, burst and video modes).

The VGA screen is as impressive as ever: it's attractive, accurate, easy to use and remains fluid even when light levels fall.  However, it's a little too glossy for use on a bright sunny day.  Ricoh's system of menus is particularly dense, especially with customisable options, and we were pleased to find advanced focus options (spot, snap and infinite mode) and a timer, often left out on competing cameras.

Responsiveness

Switching the CX2 on is about average, but once it's ready to go, it's much faster than a lot of other others: focusing is very fast in wide-angle and perfectly reasonable in tele photo.  Even better, in 'snap' and 'infinite' focus modes respectively, the camera sets locks its focus at a distance of 2.5 m or on the horizon, removing the need for the autofocus.  Of course, you can only use these modes when your subject is at a suitable distance, but not many compacts allow you to take instant photos in these circumstances.


The burst mode is something to behold, reaching four frames per second, and it gets gradually faster as you decrease the quality, reaching 120 fps at VGA quality.

Image Quality

We're already familiar with the sensor in the CX2: it's a high-speed CMOS model produced by Sony that's made appearances both on the Ricoh CX1 and a whole range of Casio cameras.  As we expected, electronic noise and blurriness are visible at 400 ISO, without causing too much trouble, but things are trickier at 800 ISO, where lots of details are lost and coloured areas appear.  1600 ISO is best avoided.


While we're looking at the photo quality, we should also mention a tendency to 'burst through' in the brightest areas, another weakness of this sensor.  The extended dynamic range mode allows you to rein this in a bit, and it also entails an increase in electronic noise.

What is new, though, is the lens, and it deserves some attention.  The 10.7x zoom is slightly less good than the 7.1x zoom on earlier models: it's accurate enough in the centre of the frame in wide-angle mode, but that falls off quickly as you move towards the corners, while in tele-photo mode it's never quite perfect.  We also noticed some chromatic aberrations, but there's nothing too dreadful on A4 prints or when looking at photos fullscreen.

Image stabilisation is reasonably efficient: in our portrait test shot was only sharp at 1/12 s.  The CX2's software tends to quickly plump for rather slow speeds, so you shouldn't hesitate to turn up the sensitivity, for example by using auto-hi mode.

Video

The sensor is capable of filming in HD, although the version included in the Sony HX1 can even support Full HD.  However, Ricoh has remained conservative, keeping the 640 x 480 pixel VGA resolution.  The sound input is typical of entry-level compacts, with a tendency to suffer from feedback and not entirely accurate--though it does manage to capture all of the noise produced by the moving lens …  Given that, it's not really worth complaining that the zoom is fixed while filming.