Review: Ricoh Caplio R7 digital camera

Compact digital cameras with large zoom lenses are now fairly common, and the Caplio R7 is the latest such offering from Ricoh.

Its wide-angle lens has a 7.1x zoom (equivalent to 28-200mm on a film camera) allowing both close ups and wide shots, so it's ideal for both group pictures and landscapes.

A number of enhancements have been made since its last incarnation, the R6. There’s a choice of black, silver, or orange body, and the resolution has been increased to over eight megapixels. Its shares an all-metal construction with its recent predecessors, making for a solid, weighty build quality.

All of the menu buttons have been enlarged so they are more accessible, and as a result the camera is more user-friendly than the R6. Refreshingly, an excellent manual is included, covering everything from how to charge the battery to good practice when composing a shot.

It also has a large, bright screen, but sadly, as with many other modern digital cameras, there’s no optical viewfinder. Anyone who has tried to view a screen in bright sunlight will know how difficult this can be.

During testing, the results we got were inconsistent. In low light, the camera produced grainy, blurred pictures despite using the image stabiliser feature, which should have compensated for camera shake on longer exposures. Enabling the flash corrected the fuzziness, but bleached the whole image out, making a softly-lit lounge look more like the scene of an X-Files alien abduction.

Conversely, however, outdoor pictures were sharp, well-balanced and extremely detailed at the highest resolution setting. The difference in the quality of the results obtained could be reduced with some tweaking of the advanced settings, but we were unimpressed that the camera’s auto mode didn't address this. Its erratic performance in different lighting conditions makes it hard to recommend as a reliable point-and-shoot camera, which is what it is intended to be.