The concept is cool. Especially since Ricoh did make some great tiny 35mm SLRs with interchangeable lenses in the flim days. (I’ve got one sitting on my shelf even) The real problem is that a good sensor is expensive enough to make this hardly worth while to bundle it, just to keep the sensors clean. (The 50mm lens was over a grand, compare to the low end canon and nikon 50s which likely match/out perform it at 100 bucks) and a CCD on the other lens? Yack. No thanks.

Follow up > http://www.dpreview.com/news/0911/09111002ricohgxrgallery.asp

Frankly I was pretty happy with what my Ricoh GR Digital II was able to do. I’d be curious to futz with the new GR-D III for the faster lens, but now that I’ve tasted truly fast autofocus with my K-7, it’s hard to go back.

Anyway, nice to see the direction Ricoh is headed. It’s as if they’ve decided their GR-D/GX/GXR body style is the perfect form factor, so they’re just going to iterate on that for a while (not unlike the Canon Digital Elph/SD series).

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