Wide World of Ricoh

Another camera that I would like to consider, the R8 which Ricoh announced recently but with less publicity compared with the other brands. By now, you might notice that I am looking for wider than normal the normal 35mm cameras. This one has a range of 28 - 200mm (7.1X optical zoom). The camera has a new 10 megapixels CCD and a brand new processor called the Smooth Image Engine III. Ricoh also dropped the Caplio name off its R series. The last of the model to carry that name is the R7. The new R8 has a high resolution 2.7" LCD with 460,000 pixels. This is a great improvement, especially compared to the current crop of 100k+ and 200k+ ones.

What really attracted my attention was, despite being a fully automated digital camera, it features a mode that will use the smallest available aperture. Definitely not as flexible as those with full manual or an aperture priority mode, but having this mode would allow maximum depth-of-field and would give my favourite "star" effects especially when shooting at night.

Check out the camera's official site here.

Previous post on a digital camera with an even wider lens:
Wide Wide World of Lumix