Ricoh CX3

Ricoh’s cameras tend to be on the bulky side, and the CX3 is no exception: compared with the slim, svelte models from other manufacturers, it’s built like a tank.

A large 3in screen takes up most of the back panel, and there aren’t many buttons or controls to clutter things up. Instead there are four buttons for accessing the menus and the self-timer, among other things, one for displaying your photos, and a four-way joystick control that puts the camera into macro mode and changes the flash setting.

On the top of the camera is the shutter button, around which is the zoom control (there is a decent 10x optical zoom lens, equivalent to 28-300mm on an old film camera) and power switch. There’s also a mode dial, which is used to put the camera into movie shooting mode, full automatic mode or one of two custom modes in which you can save your own settings. There are also several automatic modes in which the camera will choose the settings based on what you’re shooting.

There is no viewfinder so images have to be composed using the screen, and as with most cameras at this price the battery is a rechargeable ‘tablet’ type that’s charged using the supplied mains charger. It saves images to SD and SDHC memory cards (not supplied) but there’s a very small amount of internal memory as well.

Some clever features include a level, to show when your shots are horizontal, and a ‘dynamic range’ mode in which the camera will shoot two pictures at once to capture both highlights and shadow detail.

Image quality was fair: the colourful shots looked good, but their sharpness left a bit to be desired on closer inspection. Low light performance was pretty good – it can do quite long exposures and there wasn’t much noise. We weren’t very impressed with its video quality – although the CX3 shoots in the high-definition resolution of 720p, we’ve seen much better video from cheaper devices.

The build quality is high, though, and the camera can withstand a few knocks. The mainly metal construction makes it look bulkier than it is at only 3cm thick and weighing a touch over 200g.

Ultimately, despite the Ricoh CX3’s clever features, the only so-so picture quality means it doesn’t quite justify its fairly high price tag.