Caplio GX100 Powers Up Point-and-Shoots

Ricoh's Caplio GX100 camera bridges the worlds of point-and-shoot and DLSR cameras, offering 10 megapixels, simple operation, and power user features.

Ricoh has taken the wraps off its Caplio GX100 camera, which straddles the world of point-and-shoot simplicity with the feature-laden power of DLSR cameras to offer a package which is sure to appeal to serious amateur photographers and pro-sumers alike.

The GX100 offers a 10.1 megapixel resolution along with a 24–72 mm zoom lens offering ƒ2.5–9.1 (wide angle) and ƒ4.4–15.8 (telephoto) aperture settings, letting photographers get beyond the cookie-cutter framing of point-and-shoot cameras and compose shots wit wide angles, or narrow in on subjects with the help of 3× optical zoom—and a macro mode can pull in objects as little as 1cm away from the lens.

The GX100 also features a 2.5-inch LCD viewfinder, and a separate removable electronic viewfinder which can be mounted on the camera’s hot shoe for SLR-style shooting. Ricoh clams the viewfinder offers complete image coverage with no parallax error; it can also be tilted for low angle shooting and is useful when lighting conditions wash out the LCD monitor. The GX100 will shoot photos in RAW format and in low-light settings down to ISO 1,600; it stores images to SD or SDHC memory cards, and 26 MB of internal memory has you covered between cards. The camera will also shoot VGA resolution video at 30 frames per second, will output to NTSC or PAL, and (of course) offers USB 2.0 connectivity for offloading your images. The camera can operate off a rechargeable battery or two NiMH AAA batteries.

The only things Ricoh hasn’t divulged about the GX100: when it will be available, and what its price points will be. Ricoh’s current GX8 model (which the GX100 will presumably replace) goes for about $500; we’d expect Ricoh to match or beat that price. When…that’s anybody’s guess.