Ricoh GXR S10 Lens Unit

I’ve owned my Ricoh GXR Camera for a couple of weeks now and discovered a few days ago that SRS Microsystems are also selling parts of this system off cheap, and as a result I purchased a Ricoh GXR S10 lens unit to go with the P10 I already own.

Ricoh GXR S10 sample pictures

I received the unit this morning, just before we were about to go out to another National Trust property, Hatfield Forest. I fitted the new unit in place of the P10 and took the GXR along as well as my Pentax K5.

My first impressions are that this unit is much better than the P10. Although it’s a small sensor unit, it’s about 40% bigger than the sensor in the P10 and this seems to make quite a lot of difference to the image quality. You can judge this for yourself by clicking the images above which were all taken today in outdoor sunny conditions although a few are in a forest setting. The maximum ISO used was 400 ISO and I’ve done a little post processing in Lightroom 4. The biggest adjustment I made was to add a big of noise reduction and sharpening to the RAW files and add contrast and clarity. The exposure was typically spot on in almost all cases.

In use the unit has much more photographic control than the P10 unit – there is full aperture adjustment from f/2.5 to f/15.8 whereas the P10 unit only has two settings f/3.3 and f/7.1. The S10 has a smaller focal length adjustment – more inline with the Ricoh GX200. In fact, with the S10 unit in-place this is very much a Ricoh GX200 and I consider that quite a good thing.