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 User & Image Quality Reports on Ricoh GR III & GR IIIX | |
markhout wrote:
Sometimes I ignore my GRIII and GRIIIx for a couple of weeks to focus on using my GFX 50Sii, M240 and/or Z7 with top-quality wideangle optics.
Then when I pick up the GRs again, I am stunned by the IQ of the GRs and easy jeans-pocket logistics. Yes my other gear has somewhat higher IQ/DR blah blah, but the GRs nail the photo time and time again.
GR3, 1/30sec 2.8, 320ISO
(click on the image if it doesn't fit your screen)
Very nice image. And I think you make a very strong point about how different cameras can enable different kinds of photographs.
When the Leica was at its peak in the work of people like Cartier-Bresson, it was the smallest, lightest, quickest camera body available in a space dominated by medium format cameras that were bulky and slow to operate. Even the SLRs when they arrived were loud, large, and clunky compared to the svelte and quiet Leica. The Leica was the pixie that HCB (if you have ever seen a film of him shooting) made dance at the tips of his fingers.
I have often thought of getting a Leica, but the lack of autofocus, the imprecision and blockages of the optical viewfinder, and the vulnerability of the old-fashioned mechanical focusing mechanism to imprecision have discouraged me. I'm sure I would have far too many misfocused images in the kind of shooting that I most often do and wind up selling the camera after six months. But, of course, YMMV.
I sometimes wonder whether HCB, if he were starting to shoot now, would choose the Leica or something like a Ricoh GR or a mirrorless body. The choices now are so different than when HCB started in the early 1930s. Some eminent photographers, like Frank Horvat and Saul Leiter, who started with Leicas went on to use small, automated camera bodies with inferior optics for their later work, including for some of their best images. Others, like Joel Meyrowitz, continue to love and swear by their Leicas.
I personally wish there were a full frame, autofocus, rangefinder-sized body that were optimized for quiet and discreet shooting. A Leica Q with interchangeable autofocus lenses would be great! Call it the MQ-1. But for now, until someone does something like that as I am sure they eventually will, the Ricoh GR bodies and the Fuji x100v and X-Pro are as close as we can get.
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