Ricoh's original GR1 was a truly innovative photographic tool when it was first introduced.  It was a tiny rangefinder that was truly pocketable and yet thanks to the outstanding GR lens, was fully capable of providing images equal to or better than the best SLR cameras around at the time when it was introduced in the 90's. As well as offering more user control than most other compacts around at the time, this miniature marvel is also built like a brick outhouse - mine is still as good today as it was when I first started using it back in 1999. Oh, I tell a lie, the wrist strap securing pin broke, so the strap is now attached on the secondary securing point on the top of the camera (see left), but apart from that it is mint.

The great thing about the GR1 is that it is a very discreet instrument. Although beautifully built, it doesn't look much and so avoids avaricious attention. The marketing and packaging etc. were also so low key in the early days, that it was almost like winning a lucky dip for those who, by chance or word of mouth, discovered the camera and found out what it could do.  This meant there was almost an unofficial club of GR1 'cognoscenti' for whom the camera was a secret weapon and sometimes when those in the know find something really cool, they don't necessarily want the whole world sharing the good thing!

However time moves on, and now Ricoh, fully aware of the marketing potential of their success with the GR series of film cameras and off the back of a series of critically well received Ricoh Caplio zoom compact digital cameras, have now turned their attentions to bringing the GR into the digital world in the form of the recently released GR Digital.

At the time of writing the camera has been in relatively short supply over here in the UK, apparently due to some change of distributor issue, so when an opportunity came along of acquiring one despite this, I decided to go for it regardless of the various negative comments, mostly based on reading technical specs only, that have been circulating in various photography blogs.

Most of the criticisms I've read have not been based on first hand experience of using the camera and there seem to be no full tests currently circulating apart from one on letsgodigital, which didn't seem to have any test shots from the camera, so I thought it would be helpful to put my first impressions of the GRD here and post some test shots.

I should emphasise that these are just first impressions, I have only been using the camera for a short time so far and I don't have resources for a full test, so these are just my own 'humble' opinions as they say!

The camera is well packaged and feels as good in the hand as previous GR cameras, although the plastic pop-up flash and the LCD look vulnerable, so it was disappointing to find that there was no soft case included in the packaging, a particularly mean spirited gesture from the manufacturer I think, particularly at this price. There is also a speaker hole in the base of the camera that I don't like the look of as I am always using bits of the scenery to support my GR1, including the ground, so I don't want a hole in the base of my compact camera that might let damp in.

Anyone with previous experience of GR cameras and a modicum of experience with digital cameras will feel quite at home with this camera and be up and shooting quite quickly once the battery has been charged. The instruction book is pretty good and all the controls and menus seem pretty logical.

I was delighted to find straight away that all sounds can be turned off, including the shutter sound. This is great for discreet photography as one thing I hated about the GR1 was the awful racket it makes winding on, which inevitably drew attention. With the GRD in 'snap', 'manual focus' or 'infinity' mode, (the GRD still makes the characteristic GR 'fluttering' sound when in auto focus mode), it is effectively a silent camera as the actual electronic shutter is barely perceptible.

What a shame then that the GRD does not have a built-in viewfinder. Even the most basic 'peep hole' matching the standard lens angle of view would have been better than nothing. It would then have been the perfect 'out of the pocket, up to the eye and back in the pocket again' silent type of street camera suitable for the Cartier Bresson modus operandi! Shame on Ricoh for this serious error, after all if they were worried about the problems of parallax error, a small note in the instruction manual stating that parallax could be an issue close-up and that the LCD should be used for confirming accurate framing, would have been fine for me. The LCD on the GRD is so good, that for close-up photography it is actually the preferable choice anyway and allows more interesting angles of view, such as low-angle etc. without having to lie prone.

As it is, even without the viewfinder issue, another shortcoming is that the LCD cannot be switched off completely, as it comes on to confirm focus and then to confirm recording, so if you were taking a picture at night with the external viewfinder attached, your face would be lit up by the LCD - this should be possible to fix in a firmware upgrade Ricoh?

While on the subject of recording, the other thing that becomes immediately apparent is that recording takes some time depending on what card you are using, particularly if you want to shoot RAW.

I had read unconfirmed reports that the shooting interval might be 1.7 seconds and that Ricoh were claiming this as some kind of achievement, but coming from a full frame DSLR that can shoot 3 frames of 12 million pixel RAW information per second, I did not quite believe this could be true, so it was with a degree of shock that I found out that this 1.7 second figure was just for JPEG and that in reality RAW recordings were worse by a factor of almost 5!