There is some flagrant nonsense appearing on the web

(OK, that's not news)

Don't believe it!

There's no perfect camera, and to compound matters, each person has his own idea of what this would be. Everyone must decide for themselves on the basis of facts what camera they like best... facts (not brand names).

I am a recent convert to AF compact cameras; the GR1 now takes precedence over my AF SLR for the majority of my outdoor snaps. I used several rangefinders in the '70s and '80s, and I've still got a soft spot for them, especially my old pre-war Contaxes (and I wish my Yashica GTN hadn't been stolen - superb camera, the Hexar of its day). We had two infrared AF compacts through the late '80s and '90s, but didn't like using these (one in particular was a reliability disaster). I spent 8 or 9 years contemplating another compact camera, one with a good spec and a good lens, plus good controls, good ergonomics, no shutter lag, small size, etc., etc..

I looked at several titanium masterpieces plus a Hexar, but surprised myself by falling for a Ricoh after using one for just a day. I liked just about everything about it, and I loved using it. It struck me as thoroughly well thought out, but I had to use one to discover this for myself. It could have used a faster top shutter speed, but otherwise I couldn't find any glaring limitations that the designers hadn't already taken into account and allowed for. (You have to be realistic.)

In my opinion the Ricoh GR-series cameras with their sharp lenses, 3-point focus confirmation, and slim yet very easy-to-use bodies are the most advanced small fixed focal length camera designs to date, representing a pinnacle of small camera evolution. They're my benchmarks to which anything else has to stand comparison to see how it measures up. So, naturally I am interested in evaluating anything similar, especially if it promises to be better in one aspect or another.

The Contax Tix and T3 appear to continue the line of thinking pioneered by Ricoh, and they have faster top shutter speeds. They appear to use virtually identical passive autofocusing modules, for instance, and the T3 uses Ricoh's zoom-like, telescoping lens barrel idea to achieve a slimmer profile. Their lenses, metering, and construction are first class. So, I want to find out what I can about them, as there are no camera shops near where I live that would have either in stock to look at.

While looking up the Contax T3 on the internet, I stumbled across some rather inexplicable negative comments written about GR1's, so I've used a few extracts from reviews by other T3 owners - purely as examples - to put such comments in proper perspective. It does not mean I actively have anything against the T3 (quite the contrary); it's just a matter of redressing the balance. Everybody's entitled to their opinion, of course, but IMHO some of these statements go a bit too far, beyond misleading. I like Contaxes, and Hexars and miniluxes, and wouldn't disparage any of them, but you'd have to be an absolute plonker to fail to get close to a 100% success rate with a GR1.

"GR1's have too much shutter lag"

This one's got me scratching my head in amazement.

Don't believe it when someone says GR- or even R-series Ricohs have shutter lag. They clearly do not. (Set the R1 to "pre-focus" mode, single AF.)

This is a vitally important point for anyone who grew up with the "decisive moment" as a photographic pre-requisite. I would never recommend a camera with shutter lag.

GR1's have "bad viewfinders"

This one's also incomprehensible. I've owned and/or used a wide variety of rangefinder cameras both old and new, including medium formats, plus had the opportunity to inspect my friend's luxury compacts (Leica minilux and Contax T2) first-hand. There are hundreds if not thousands of small cameras out there with appalling viewfinders, but the GR1 certainly isn't one of them.

There is less barrel distortion and there are fewer internal reflections in a GR1 finder than in my friend's Contax T2. Finder information is better and the full-width framing lines are clearer and better delineated. The close-up corrections for parallax are better, too. The GR1 has two extra full-width bars across the top of the field of view to corect for parallax at different distance ranges. I've compared my GR1 with a Contax Tix side-by-side and the Contax is nice but it's not significantly better (remember, I like Contaxes - used to own one). Again, in my opinion finder information and framing lines aren't as good. This just isn't as big an issue as it's made out to be. There are many, many far worse finders out there, and that includes old cameras as well as new. To me (and I wear specs) the GR-series finders are uniformly excellent (the only minor problem is that the LCD overlay dims in bright light). The solid prism optical system gives a very clear, very sharp and totally undistorted view, accurately framed - what more does anyone need?

Judging from accident reports, Ricoh GR- and R-series compacts use plastic front windows covering their finder optics, but look around at all the plastic spectacle lenses in use nowadays. Yes, scratch-resistant toughened glass would be better, but I haven't noticed that my GR1 doesn't have it. So is this really an issue? I don't think so.

The GR1 definitely has better framing lines for close-ups. Two separate full-width lines come into play for different close-up distances. According to the photo.net threads, Contax T3 finders are supposed to be better. Well, although they're very nice optically, I've compared them side-by-side with my GR1 and they're so similar most people wouldn't notice the difference. The GR1 conveys more useful information; particularly the 3-point focus confirmation. The shutter speeds are easier to read on the T3, but, when I used one, the readouts were an inadequate "500" & "125," lit together. Crucially, focus confirmation is limited to a green dot at the bottom of the field of view, so you have no idea if the camera focused where you thought. This is no better than the 10 year old AF compact I never liked using; yet even that earlier design at least had distance range symbols in the viewfinder.

Under Contax T3 "Weaknesses" on photographyreview.com, written by actual owners, we find:

Finder only gives an approximate shutter speed

confusing shutter speed readouts.

Inability to really know what shutter speed you're working at

The only reason I don't "love" this camera is because as a discriminating photographer, I want to be able to know exactly what shutter speed I'm shooting at (a very basic piece of information)... this camera for some odd reason doesn't give you that info. It only gives a ballpark shutter speed. I spoke with Contax and apparently this has been the design on all of the T series cameras.

The view finder gives speeds, but they do not represent what they say- 30 means about 1/90???

hard to know where I am shooting when in macro mode

Quite difficult to know what I am shooting at when I am in macro mode

In addition to having parallax lines the full width of the frame and which only become visible when needed, GR1's have a more complete shutter speed index at the left of the finder, showing speeds from a 30th to a 500th, in 5 standard one stop steps.

GR1's are badly built

Let's get this straight. GR1's are beautifully engineered. The R- and GR-series Ricohs embody a whole raft of technological breakthroughs in small camera design. They're classics in the truest sense; they're originals. There isn't a gimmick on them - every aspect of their design is brilliantly conceived and emminently functional. They're the benchmarks other small cameras have to measure up to, not vice-versa.

The lightweight precision magnesium die-castings are exquisite. The GR1 hasn't just got a magnesium alloy body - the back cover and the top and bottom plates are also die-cast magnesium alloy. Are sheet metal pressings better? Titanium is as strong as steel. Compare for example standard steel car wheels versus magnesium alloy.

I cannot understand where someone would get the idea that GR1's are badly built. I suspect they don't have an engineering background (I do). Maybe it's the weight difference - other compacts are heavier, perhaps giving the impression that they're more substantial.

Here's what one Contax T3 owner says on photographyreview.com:

It looks small and compact, but it's a bit heavy

Weights: Contax T3, 230 grams; GR1, 175 grams. Maybe in Victorian steam-age engineering terms, the heavier camera would seem to be better engineered, but not in aerospace terms. I know which I'd rather have in my pocket.

Here's a recent real-life true story; it refers to a brand new Contax T3:

"I love mine and was hearbroken (sic) when I dropped it onto some rocks while on vacation last week in the mountains. It still continued to take perfectley (sic) exposed pictures. However, since it suffured (sic) a serious ding to the top of the case, I sent it in for a check/repair to revalidate the three year warranty." - P. Bonner (Contax T3 - User Comments, Discussion; greenspun.com : LUSENET : Camera Equipment : One Thread)

The heavier they are, the harder they fall. There's no doubt that titanium compacts feel gorgeously substantial. The Contax Tix feels solid as a rock; it gives the impression it's bombproof. Unfortunately, this can be a trifle misleading - the simple fact is: thin titanium is only as strong as thin steel, and if you whack it - like steel - it will dent. Touted as "durable," if you want cameras with thin titanium shells to stay looking nice, you have to treat them like heirlooms. If you want proof, check out the second hand market over a period of time. An awful lot of titanium shelled luxury compacts have at least one dent.

Finally, if anything should go wrong with your Ricoh, and this back-up is really important, there's the assurance of a 5 year guarantee. Unlike other makes in our experience, who shall remain nameless, the UK Ricoh distributor provides excellent, fast, and courteous service*. They have a phone help-line, and I personally find it very reassuring that practically everybody who works there in the technical department have GR1's themselves.

*My sister's GR1 shutter jammed (which could happen to any camera left in the trunk of a car in a hot, sandy desert) but it was repaired quickly, free of charge. This contrasts SHARPLY with two other well-known brands, whose so-called service departments (here in the UK) are downright rude, condescending, over-priced, unbelievably slow, and, on top of all that, incompetant to boot. (I am not referring to Konica, who did a marvelous job on a camera my son had some years ago.)

GR1's are noisy

These cameras are not manually powered; they're tiny little machines with tiny motors. How much noise can such tiny motors make? And so what? These tiny whirring sounds don't bother me - you should hear my Nikon AF SLR. From a few feet away the sound is barely noticeable. Recently I was able to take two successive pictures of a wild bird at a distance of no more than 20 inches without frightening it. With my AF SLR, it would have been long gone.

Under the Contax T3 "Weaknesses" on photographyreview.com, one finds:

Camera lens motor is noisy when you turn it on

The only pet peeve I have with this camera is the it is rather loud when you turn it on-- about as loud as the minilux. The lens opens and retracts with a long chirpy whirrrr sound. You can't help but announce to everyone in the room that you have a camera!

... Way too much fuss about nothing. If all these people wanted quiet cameras, they should have bought quieter cameras.

GR1's are slower than...

Look at the article about the GR1 that went to the South Pole. Stuffed into a duffel bag on a sledge, it did the entire trip on its original battery in extreme cold. They're energy-efficient, and I'd rather that than a bigger camera with bigger, more power-hungry motors. Ricoh says they're good for 12.5 x 24-exp rolls of film; Kyocera states "about" 7 x 24-exp rolls for the T3 on their website (both with 50% flash). The CR-2 is a tiny battery. The GR10, incidentally, uses a CR123A, which is about twice the size of a CR-2 and lasts at least twice as long in the camera.

You can't win. Under the Contax T3 "Weaknesses" on photographyreview.com, one finds:

sometimes a bit slow getting to next frame

In fact, the GR1 is extremely quick to set and operate; both flash mode and focus mode can be set before the camera gets to the eye in one smooth motion. My AF SLR isn't any quicker, and a Contax T3 doesn't even come close - to set the T3's flash mode requires pushing the flash mode button several times, and since it doesn't remember this setting when you turn it off, you have to re-do it every time you want to use it. Setting focus at, say, 2 meters or infinity is even more long-winded; you have to access the AF menu, then turn a command wheel to scroll through a list of distances until you find your choice. With a Ricoh you'd have had several photos by then; I know I'd get fed up with the out-moded control setup on the Contax. If you wanted to set ± film speed compensation as well, it's yet another mode scroll, plus more command dial twiddling. The GR1 is superior here, too; it's not only got a sensibly-large, easy dial, there's also a big ± symbol in the finder as a reminder.

The T3 in my book falls short of qualifying as a "proper camera." It's a fine point-and-shoot but lacks the controls that would make it easy to do the things I want a camera to do. The Tix is better. It remembers the flash settings when turned off, and it has flash out-of-distance warnings. Its built-in lens hood is the icing on the cake for me - if it had 3-point focus confirmation and defaulted to a hyperfocal distance rather than locking up whenever you tried to shoot before focus was achieved, it'd be closer to perfection.

GR1's don't focus as well as...

We use precision auto-focusing most of the time, and our R- and GR-series cameras have virtually no problems focusing. Provided the AF brackets are over vertical lines or details there shouldn't be any problem. (Since both my wife and I used to use manual rangefindrers we do this instinctively.) Moreover, you can bang away on the shutter without regard to the focusing and still get decent shots because these cameras revert to a 2.5m/8.2ft default whenever the AF system can't find focus - so you don't miss grab shots. This is called release-priority. The Yashica Contax Tix simply locks up if it fails to find focus (I didn't try this with the T3). This is referred to as focus-priority.

I noticed something else when trying the T3: when focusing, it takes a moment to process the AF signal, then when it's done it racks the lens all the way out and then racks it back in again, stopping wherever the focused point is. The GRs don't do that; they start off with the lens at a hyperfocal distance point, and just move the lens to the right focused distance at first press of the shutter button. Hence it's noticeably faster than a T3, not just milliseconds faster.

The GR1 focuses almost instantly most of the time; it focuses in total darkness; it even focuses on pale, transparent reflections; it focuses on practically everything I want it to, when I want. It only sometimes has a problem with very small things, close up, especially if they're not standing still. Judging from owners' reports, this is characteristic of all small cameras using this type of passive focusing module, regardless of make.

Re: The new Yashica Contax T3 with a very similar AF system? Under the Contax T3 "Weaknesses" on photographyreview.com, one finds:

hard to "close focus".

and...
this from http://camerareview.com/:

"I purchased the T5 in Europe recently, and love it so far. It is both fast and a pleasure to use, compared to the T3 I also have. The T3 is much slower in taking a picture, plus sometimes it hesitates long enough that the image is actually lost."

Ricoh's AF couldn't be more user-friendly. My wife learned to use autofocus with her GR10; for the previous 10 or 11 years, she could only handle focusing my AF SLR manually; now she uses its AF without a second thought.

You just have to use all these cameras intelligently, understanding how they work, be they active infrared or passive AF. They are not going to work as swiftly or as accurately as a modern AF SLR and shouldn't be expected to, but they are not bad either. (Several Canon compacts use a hybrid active IR/passive AF system which certainly looks good on paper; I tried one in a shop and it's fast. The latest Minolta Riva AF system is even more fascinating. It uses 7 horizontal CCDs as used in AF SLRs, and it can differentiate between human subjects and inanimate objects in a scene, and it uses AF area and distance information to set exposure and control flash output. There are red focus area brackets in the finder, showing a total of 3 vertical and 8 horizontal focus area combinations.)

Another recurrent complaint about the T3 is that it's fiddly to focus manually. I can vouch for that; I've done it. It's push a button and twiddle a dial scale-focusing, scrolling through a menu of distance choices. You have to go through this routine to set a T3 to infinity (maybe I missed an infinity setting). The GR1 neatly side-steps that whole problem area by virtue of a couple of quick settings. Or, if you want a specific distance, rather than guestimating it and then setting it numerically, you just point the GR1 at whatever it is you want to be focused on, and lock it in; using Fixed Focus mode it stays until cancelled. Or you can just use Snap mode (2 meters), or Infinity mode.

The T3 has an extra, very tiny, button right next to the shutter button for locking focus independently of exposure. It can be customized to lock both focus and exposure, but its main use, as I see it, would be as a sort of fixed focus mode and as such a lot more use than manual focusing. It can be customized to do just one frame or stay locked as long as the power is on. Thus it would be easier and quicker to set than the GR1's Fixed Focus Mode, which requires you to hold down the Focus Mode button for a full second at the same time as holding the focus by half-pressing the shutter button (not as tricky as it sounds, but almost, with practice; fortunately Snap and Infinity Modes are more often used). If it's like the Tix, the T3 still requires the camera to be focused on something before it can fire, which definitely isn't always convenient.

My wife, for instance, doesn't notice the focusing indicators half the time, but because of Ricoh's default focusing arrangement it doesn't actually make any difference; the camera still fires, focused at 2.5 meters (8.2 feet). The thing to bear in mind is that there are situations where an AF system cannot focus; in such cases it's better to have a default to fall back on rather than having the camera simply lock up. This system has never failed to get a decent shot whenever we've encountered such situations or simply been too quick for the AF system. In either case, with a camera that locks up those shots would have been missed.

My wife shot the photo (above right) through the glass window of a moving car. She didn't have time to notice whether any focusing brackets in the finder were flashing or not. I am assuming the camera worked on defaults. No active infrared system would have accomplished this simple job either (because they can't focus through glass).

What else?

I have big hands, yet the GR1 is easy for me to operate; I can do it with gloves on in Winter. I couldn't use the tiny AF lock button on the T3 (maybe I could with practice, but it's definitely not easy). This is what two T3 owners have to say on photographyreview.com:

The dial and the buttons are a bit too small

the buttons and the dial are too small, but can you expect big buttons on a small camera like that?

Well, yes you can, is the quick answer to that.

If you need a camera to impress the sort of people impressed by the name on the front, buy a titanium luxo-compact. If you want to spend an irrelevent amount of dosh on an impeccably well-built, simple point-and-shoot, a titanium luxo-compact wouldn't be a bad choice. Use it on its default settings. Take care of it, and its electronics will become obsolete long before it wears out.

With cameras I look for good design, good controls and sound engineering.
And, of course, good image quality. I want reliability and trustworthiness.
I want to be able to rely on a camera.

I've got decent cameras for everyone in my family, and all four cost less than one T3. So far they've been trustworthy. The difference in color balance between Japanese lenses and Japanese-made "German" lenses makes no difference in a monochrome darkroom. I waited for a 35mm format version of the Tix, but unfortunately several of the things I liked about the Tix have been left off the T3 (just as bits of what I like about the GR1 have been left off the Tix).

What about APS?

I used a half-frame Olympus Pen Ft for about 10 years, so I'm not put off by the smaller APS format, though if you get the odd zinger you want to enlarge beyond a certain point, it has to be very fine-grained; 35mm is still better. APS films, though smaller, cost more to buy and more to process than 35mm. APS, with print quality improvement, nevertheless remains attractive, especially after having been shown some really excellent panoramic APS prints at a Costco lab in Tucson. But an aquaintance in London tells me that customers to a shop he frequents bring back APS cameras daily that have locked up, jammed with films that failed to rewind completely into the cassettes. This can't be fixed in a changing bag - they have to be sent to a camera repairer, and it's costly. Then there is the friend of a friend, who took his quality APS compact across North Africa, and whose pictures showed a strange identical pattern of specs. These turned out to be particles of dust on the rear lens element. Since the film chamber is inaccessible on fixed-lens APS cameras, a simple puff of air was not possible - and so it had to go to a camera repairer.