My Poor Ricoh – Off For Repairs

I love my Ricoh. It’s by far my most-used camera. Unfortunately it’s off for repairs…
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It’s got a dust spot on the sensor I can’t deal with any longer.

While I wouldn’t call myself a Ricoh Fanboy, I’ve had three now, and I’ve fallen in love with the complete control Ricoh endows their users with. It’s almost as if Ricoh is the only company that actually trusts their users to read the manual and understand the controls. Even if you don’t do that, the Ricoh is easy to put in Manual Mode and figure out. My most-used camera before this was my Ricoh GRD-IV that I loved too. While there’s some argument on the internet that the GRD IV is better at some things than the GR, I disagree. For my uses the GR is almost the perfect camera. (Almost because it should be full-frame, 35mm equivalent instead of 28mm, have a 2.0 max aperture instead of 2.8, it should stay roughly the same size and still cost under a grand… yeah, I know, keep dreaming… or else go back to film.)

The dust speck is large enough to be visible on the rear viewscreen, and although it’s at the edge, it’s visible in every photograph. Sure – I could crop it out… But the camera is only 8 months old, and not one where the end user can easily clean the sensor.

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It’s visible on the viewscreen.

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And of course on photos it’s very visible.

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It’s much worse at smaller apertures (of course) and against a blue sky it’s hard to ignore it any longer. I emailed Ricoh Customer Service and they asked that I send it in… frustrating because I’m using this camera almost exclusively for an ongoing project, but hopefully they can sort it out and get it back to me quickly…

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I’ve labeled the camera with a couple notes, I hope the issue is obvious. I’m afraid they’ll say “we didn’t notice anything… all clear!” That seems to be my experience with customer service more often than not. I’ve also noticed the front control wheel is getting harder and harder to turn… Might as well have them address that too, right?

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I also labeled the bottom of my camera so Ricoh can check out my blog and know that one of their fans is anxiously awaiting the return (or replacement) of his favorite camera so he can get back to making photos… Ahhh photos… that’s what the Ricoh is best at. It’s a great little camera, unnoticed by anyone, lightweight and easy to pack. Just seal the little guy up a bit better Ricoh.

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