Ricoh GXR + A12 50mm Module

While the current trend is for compacts with interchangeable lenses—offering the advantages of an SLR but with a much reduced form factor—Ricoh has taken a different approach to things by building a basic camera body that can be fitted with various 'modules', each equipped with a different sensor and lens combo (see sidebar). Today we're testing the A12 50 mm module for the Ricoh GXR, which has an APS sensor and a macro lens equivalent to 50 mm.

Handling

The name GXR will sound fairly familiar to most people who've used a Ricoh compact. The GX and GR ranges are the brand's classic expert compacts, often held up as examples of fantastic handling among experienced users.


For more information about the GXR body, please go to our review of the GXR with P10 28-300 mm module. Basically though, it's an expert compact camera body as we like them, with plenty of settings, an excellent screen and advanced customisation options (you can pick which options go in the ADJ menu and save custom settings in three different modes). The body can seem a little harsh-looking to general users, but anyone looking to customise their camera body—almost as much as an expert SLR—will be able to look past the design.

The A12 50 mm module is a well-made piece of kit. There's no noticeable wobble to the lens and there's a handy manual focusing ring (this electronic ring actually controls the autofocus system) and, more surprisingly, a built-in telescopic sunshade!

Note that in manual focusing mode plus A and M mode, the GXR shows you not only the focusing distance but also the depth of field, which is great news for anyone who likes to work with the hyperfocal distance.

Like all macro lenses, the A12 extends quite far out of its casing when taking close-up shots. At 7 cm from the subject it protrudes 25 mm out of its barrel, for example, making it the bulkiest GXR module by far. Loaded with this A12 50 mm module, the GXR is much bigger than the average compact-interchangeable-lens camera equipped with a pancake lens. In fact, it's more like a small SLR with a fixed focal length. Its high magnification does, however, allow it to take a full-frame shot of objects 3.5 cm long, just like a 1:1 macro lens on a 24 x 36 format SLR.

Responsiveness

As promised, Ricoh's new firmware does improve the autofocus. However, the A12 50 mm module still isn't exactly lightning fast and in regular autofocus mode it's exactly the same as the as the A12 28 mm, taking around one second to focus. This is noticeably slower than micro four-thirds cameras or Sony's NEX cameras, for example, and is even slightly slower than some compact cameras (including the P10 28-300 mm GXR module).

The autofocus is even slower in macro mode. That's both logical and normal though, as for high magnification the lenses require more time to get into position. However, it won't make it any easier to take pictures of small, moving subjects such as insects. For subjects like that, you're better off fixing the focus at a given distance then moving the camera forwards and backwards as required.

Finally, the camera is still quite slow to start up, taking over two seconds to get ready for action.

Picture Quality

The A12 50 mm module has the same APS-C sensor as the A12 28 mm module, and so picture quality is very similar. This Ricoh module gives excellent results up to 1600 ISO. At 3200 ISO, the original Jpegs are still perfectly good enough to use, although noise will be visible on an 8" x 12" print (20 x 30 cm). Clearly though, with the same sensor, Nikon and Pentax can do much better.


The 33 mm lens (equivalent to 50 mm) gives very good results, particularly when closed a stop or two.


As expected, this lens does very well in macro mode, capturing a zone 36 mm wide, which is as good as a 'genuine' 1:1 macro mode with a 24 x 36 mm sensor. Chromatic aberration is kept under control and there's a high level of detail over the whole frame from full aperture ... so long as the subject is in line with the plane of the sensor: at f/2.5 and maximum magnification the depth of field is 3 mm.


There's no optical stabilisation system in this module. In auto mode and in low light, the GXR tends to drop to very low speeds very quickly indeed (e.g. 1/15 sec.) and photos soon become blurred as a result. In such conditions, you'll have to keep a very close eye on shutter speed.

Video

As Ricoh hasn't standardised video modes in the GXR system, the video mode varies in quality from one module to the next. The A12 50 mm module films 720p HD video at 24 fps in the Mjpeg format (a basic, not very high-performance codec). The picture is typically sharp in good light but noisy in low light. Sound isn't recorded by the module but by the GXR camera body itself so, as with the P10 28-300 mm module, it's low-quality mono sound that lacks sharpness and detail. For example, voices can sometimes be difficult to hear if there's lots of background noise to contend with.