Ricoh has announced the GX200 compact. This replaces the Caplio GX100 compact digital camera introduced in April 2007.
The GX200 inherits GX100's 24-72 mm zoom lens (35 mm film equivalent focal length) and basic body shape (if you put the two side by side, the lack of the name 'Caplio' on the GX200 is the key external difference). And once again the camera offers a wide variety of manual shooting functions, and a removable tilting electronic viewfinder. The big changes in the new GX200 are a 12 megapixel CCD (up from 10 MP in the previous model) and claims of 'dramatic noise reduction' from the new Smooth Imaging Engine III image processing engine.
The GX200 sports a 2.7" 460,000 dot HVGA LCD, which is claimed to have a wide-viewing angle. It features an electronic level function, for horizontal and vertical shooting.There are now three 'my settings' memory positions and more mode change buttons. The AF target shift function, which before could only be used in macro shooting, is now also available in normal shooting. This means that without moving the camera, it is possible to shift the target for AF or AE or both. Perhaps more importantly, the RAW buffer has been beefed up, so more RAW files in one sitting, and less time spent waiting for the files to process.
The Ricoh GX200 standard kit comes with electronic viewfinder included, and will be available in the beginning of July 2008 priced at £399.99 inc vat., GX200 Standard (without viewfinder) will be available available at £349.99. Additional extras include the TC-1 Teleconverter lens (£99.99), the DW-6 19 mm Wide angle lens (£99.99) and the LC-1 Tri-Lens Cap (£19.99), which fits on both the GX100 and GX200. So far, there are no details on the effective focal length of the TC-1 teleconverter, but it's rumoured to be in the 105-135mm region (35 mm film equivalent focal length).
We hope to test a Ricoh GX200 in the next few weeks.
http://www.ricoh.co.uk
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