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Ricoh Caplio R30
Price: £199.99 inc VAT

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 13/03/2006
Featured in magazine:
Issue 129
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: Ricoh
Tel: 020 8261 4000
Web Address: www.ricoh.co.uk


Ricoh's Caplio digital camera range has been specialising in packing decent optical zooms into small packages. The lastest model, the Caplio R30, is no different, featuring the range's smallest case yet, a bigger zoom and a handy ability to take good-quality snaps.

Features
The R30's list of features speaks for itself. It has a 5.7x optical zoom, takes 5 megapixel snaps and has a 6cm LCD screen to view them on. It's quick too, with a shutter lag (the time between pressing the button to take a snap and that shot actually being taken) down to about a tenth of a second, while the flash charge and recharge speed has also been improved over previous models we've tested. It comes with a rechargeable battery and takes movies up to 320 by 240 pixels at 30 frames per second. To transfer images your camera connects to your computer via a supplied mini-USB cable, or it can link straight to any printer that supports the PictBridge standard.

Performance
Our test shots, taken on the basic automatic settings, came out well, despite adverse conditions for in-the-field camera testing (dreary January days). The flash wasn't brilliant in poor light, but didn't do too bad a job of capturing subtle skin tones even quite close up. However, we found it to be too close to the shutter button, causing a number of flash shots to suffer uneven shadows from our gangly fingers getting in the way.

Ease of use
While the camera itself is very straight-forward, the PC connection is less easy to use. At its most basic you can simply use it as a card reader, dragging-and-dropping your pictures directly from the camera to a folder on your computer. The supplied software will automate this task but not in a particularly friendly way – it's probably easier to stick with the drag-and-drop option. While it's not an enormous hurdle, we'd have to recommend beginners look elsewhere for a camera that smoothes out the PC connection process.

Value for money
The recommended price is at the good value end of the scale for a camera with these features, and you're still likely to find it discounted if you shop around on the web. If you already have some decent image-editing software (for getting the images off the camera) and a bit of digital camera savvy, this could be seen as quite a bargain.

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