If you take your digital photography seriously, but don't want to have to carry around a bulky SLR, your main choice is a high quality, 35mm compact equivalent. This semi-pro market is where Ricoh is aiming its Caplio GR Digital. It's a slim and fairly lightweight compact, which looks conventional enough but packs a number of convincing extras.

The most obvious of these is the large LCD display. We haven't seen many compact cameras with 63mm LCDs. The size makes it much easier to frame subjects, but also provides enough room for function icons around its edge and an optional histogram display showing colour balance.

The disadvantage of the big screen is that there's apparently no room for an optical viewfinder in the case, so you have to use the LCD. In fact, a viewfinder is an optional extra, and slides into the flash hotshoe on top of the GR Digital. There's no focus-lock indicator, though, so with it fitted, you have to rely on a beep to tell you you're focused.

The standard F2.4 lens system has six elements in five groups and produces exceptionally sharp images for a camera of its size. With 8-megapixel files, even compressed JPEGs are going to be big, but that's the price you pay for this level of detail. An uncompressed RAW frame is close to 25MB.

As well as a fully-automatic mode, where you just point and shoot, you can select manual, program, program shift AE and Aperture Priority modes. These cater for people who want more control over exposure and focus. The camera can focus from 30cm down to 1.5cm in macro mode and it uses a nine-point auto-focus to try to ensure sharp shots.

The viewfinder isn't the only optional extra; you can fit a hood and adapter to the front of the camera and a 0.75x wide-angle converter. Removing the ring cover and fitting these accessories can be fiddly and you have to have somewhere to store the little powder-bag they come in.

A Lithium-Ion battery pack, good for around 250 shots, is provided in the box with a charger, but the internal memory, a mere 26MB, isn't enough for an 8-megapixel camera. It gives you just 14 shots at the camera's default resolution of 3,264 x 2,448 pixels and only one if you shoot in RAW format. Would it really have bust the budget to have built in 64MB?

Verdict
In many ways this is a superb compact digital camera. It's easy to use as a fully-automatic device, but has manual and semi-automatic modes if you want more control. The large LCD is a boon, though some may find the lack of an optical viewfinder irritating... and all will bemoan the paltry memory.

Company: Ricoh

Contact: 020 8261 4031

Tags: ricoh liquid crystal display aperture priority jpeg single-lens reflex camera raw image format lithium-ion battery viewfinder