The Online Photographer

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[UPDATE: You can pre-order the GXR body shell, A12 50mm ƒ/2.5 Macro GR Lens with APS-C 12.3-MP CMOS Sensor, or S10 24–72mm ƒ/2.5–4.4 VC Ricoh Lens with 10-MP CCD Sensor at Amazon.com. Amazon has an information page about the system too. It will be interesting to see if anyone actually orders one of these today!  —MJ]

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Mike: The first thing I thought of when I saw the video about the Ricoh GXR—the link was sent to me by Arnaud Révillon, by the way, so thanks, Arnaud—was "newthink." That refers to an old column of mine written much earlier in the digital era called "Oldthink." "Thinking out of the box" is a cliché and thus firmly inside the box, but the GXR is really an attempt to do something completely different. And I generally like it when manufacturers attempt to re-imagine products.

Ctein: I still don't have the GXR sussed. The question that is still in my head is, "What were they thinking?" I don't mean that snarkily. I'm still trying to figure out the rationale for the camera, because I am sure Ricoh has one: they are not stupid, and they've put a lot of time and money and thought into doing this.

I don't think this is about image quality. Sure, if they announce some exotic modules like a monochrome one or Fovean ones, then they're offering something sufficiently different from the pack that how the photographs look will matter. But the specifications for current modules are sufficiently run-of-the-mill that I assume they will have good (for some value of "good") image quality more or less like their competitors. More than that is pixel-peeping.

I'm still trying to figure out the logic behind the combined lens/sensor module. Sure, it has modest technical advantages. Better dust sealing, but that can be done easily enough with separate modules (e.g., a dark slide that covers the sensor when the lens or body modules are decoupled from the sensor module). In principle Ricoh can closely match lens and sensor characteristics (we don't know that they do), but that only produces modest improvements in quality, and there are other ways to address that, too. Flange thickness? Insignificant. Lens/sensor alignment? Not an issue. Upgradability? This is actually the opposite of upgradability—toss the sensor, toss the lens!

Ctein: I'm not sure about marketability, either. Seems to me that for every photographer who'd be excited about a modular camera, there will be two who won't be able to get the sensor/lens combination they want or will be really irritated by what they perceive as unnecessary expense (the expense may not be really there, but look at how many people resent video capability in a camera because they're erroneously convinced it costs them a little bit of money). So why the combo approach? I'm not there yet. Every reason I come up with doesn't quite seem to make sense.

A question for you, Mike: You are preternaturally sensitive to image grain and texture, to the extent that you don't like to mix and match media in the same group of photos and you don't even like to crop (film or digital) in part because of the ways in which it changes that look. In light of that, does this approach bug the heck out of you? Or not?

Mike: Yup, that would be a problem for me. At least if I were using it like a single system camera that's supposed to have different lenses for different purposes. Just the idea of mixing 'n' matching a 1/1.7" sensor and an APS-C sensor would be something that wouldn't appeal to me. I'd be worried about making the look of the pictures match.

This is partly a real concern and partly just obsessiveness. That is, if I can see a difference, then it bugs me. It doesn't matter if most viewers can't tell. So partly it's a real concern and partly it's just me being a nut.

Back to marketability, though: doesn't this concept depend on there being numerous lens/sensor modules so that there's something for everybody? It seems to me it might be a viable product with, say, forty modules, or even with ten, but who's going to buy it when there are two? Pretty much just people who specifically want either a camera with a 10-MP 1/1.7" CCD sensor with a 24–72mm-e lens, or people who want a 12-MP APS-C CMOS sensor and a 50mm-e prime macro lens. In reverse order, that's one largish market, but with lots of competition, and one pretty small market. If Ricoh could access 40 (or 20) small markets in that way, well and good, but two isn't likely to be enough.

The only way to make money off of that is if you're in it for the long haul. You have to get the concept across to the consumers who are well-heeled enough to buy a camera in this price range, and that takes a bit of time. Plus, you have to build up enough of a selection of modules that they don't feel deprived. Either/or is the kiss of death, because it draws people's attention to the features that their preferred module doesn't have. The only way that I see that you avoid discouraging customers is if you have enough different options that most any reasonable preference in the combination of features and performance is being met.

But, if you have all those different modules, you have to sell enough of each one to get the economies of scale in production. That takes time and a substantial investment and commitment. If Ricoh is indeed thinking of this as a long-term program that doesn't have to produce short-term returns, then they have more of a chance of succeeding. If, on the other hand this is a program that management, for some reason, is counting on for a quick win, then I fear it's much more likely to be DOA.

Long-term also gives you more of a chance to amortize your R&D costs. If the underlying platform design remains constant through several camera generations, that's a lot less money put into reinventing the wheel.

Mike: If my first thought was "newthink," my next thought was, "that's never going to work." There are a couple of things that struck me about it. First, I'm very good at imagining possible solutions to problems—that is to say, I'm good at "ideation" or idea-generation. And a pocket-sized camera with interchangeable lens-sensor modules is an idea that has never once occurred to me. I'm not saying that I've already thought of every good idea, of course, but, as I always say, I'm just sayin'.

Secondly, I find this camera keeps making me shape-shift back and forth from my camera-reviewer mode to my camera-user-and-consumer mode. As a camera reviewer, I like it—it's new, it's fresh, it has possibilities. As a camera user-and-consumer, it looks like a big headache. You touched in this when you said some photographers "won't be able to get the sensor/lens combination they want." A reader named Charles Hueter put it even better in the comments: "Optimizing sealed modules is a nifty idea," he wrote, "but not for someone who disagrees with the 'marriages' offered." It's those marriages that look ominous to me. As somebody who characteristically is too picky about lenses, and has a hard time finding the right lens for any given camera, the GXR system looks like it would be tailor-made to frustrate. One module would have the perfect sensor, another module would have the perfect lens. And never the twain would meet. A module might have the perfect lens and sensor size but not the right sensor type or pixel count. With more fixed variables, you increase the likelihood of frustrating people who know in advance what they want.

For instance, I responded positively in the comments when somebody mentioned the possibility of a B&W module. I said "I'd buy that." But then I thought, what if the only B&W sensor module had a 100mm-e lens? I wouldn't buy that. What if it had a 35mm-e lens but a 1/2.5" sensor? I wouldn't buy that, either. They've have to get everything right for me to get me to lay real money down, and the chances of that happening are probably slim to none.

And a third idea I wanted to throw at you: Do you think competition is necessary to make a product category work? Canon pushes Nikon and Nikon pushes Canon. On the other hand, Foveon has languished, relatively speaking, despite having some very nice qualities and despite making a lot of sense. (Bayer arrays are pretty inelegant, sort of the modern equivalent of tri-color cameras.) Could it be that that's because it's a hermetic product, limited to one company? Another commenter mentioned the Wankel engine, and I thought of the Walsh driver—two good ideas that seemed to go nowhere because one company hoarded the rights. If two or more companies were making Foveon sensors, would it have taken off by now? Would development, on the one hand, and acceptance on the other, have moved faster? I'm well aware that one of the points that interests people about the Micro 4/3 system is that you can mount many different kinds of lenses on it, using adapters. I've never been a fan of that solution myself, but that flexibility is important to people. People like the idea. Would Ricoh's idea stand a better chance if other companies could make modules for the body or bodies for the modules?

Ctein: There are two important questions that I don't know the answers to. The first is whether there are economic savings to this modular approach that I'm entirely missing. If there are major savings I haven't taken into account, then the whole risk analysis goes out the window.

If there aren't, the big question I'm left with is whether this is truly a strategic move on Ricoh's part? Because if there aren't immediate major economic savings, then this doesn't look like a short-term economic winner to me. But...it's possible that Ricoh has done truly brilliant marketing research and the two modules that they're starting with are exactly what enough of the market wants to make these cameras immediate successes. My gut feeling says, "no"...but if my gut were all that trustable, I'd be rich.

I don't have a feeling that competition has much to do with it. Or, if it does, the cart and the horse belong in a different order. I think most one-company technologies are one-company technologies because they're not honestly interesting enough to develop competition. I don't recall that Foveon was in any way restricted to dealing with Sigma alone. They couldn't drum up other interests. (And, by the way, I agree with you that full-color integrated pixels are a lot more elegant than Bayer arrays.)

So, one "tell" might be whether we see other companies introducing modular systems in the next couple of years, whether they're compatible with Ricoh or not.

Technologically, I can see all sorts of cool things that could be done with this modular configuration; many readers have already commented about that. I don't actually think that's very relevant to our discussion. Absent a long term strategic commitment, the system won't be around long enough nor get enough capital invested in it for the cool stuff to happen.

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Featured Comment by Mitch Alland: "Many people are reacting to the 'waste' of the GXR sensor/lens module concept in that, when upgrading to a new sensor, the lens cannot be kept. The Ricoh website has a 14-page brochure [PDF download] on the GXR that explains the rationale for the closed sensor/lens module. Page 4 of the brochure states (in marketing-speak):

Compact, high-performance lens design at a level only possible
 with the interchangeable unit system
: It is the lens that gives life to the photograph. In interchangeable lens
 camera systems up to now, the distance from the mount and the back of the 
lens to the sensor image plane was subject to requirements for flange back
 distance and back focal length. This made it difficult to achieve both
 compactness and high optical performance.

Eliminating the lens mount, however, means that the back focal length can
 be freely defined for the GXR, enabling it to use the most optically
 efficient lens designs with the minimum size. In addition, combining the 
lens and image sensor increases design flexibility so camera units can be
 developed based on a variety of concepts. This practical inspiration has
 given birth to a totally new camera system with portability, high image
 quality and superb expandability and growth potential as a system.

"Thus, it seems to me, that once there is a new sensor, that there will be changes in the lens, as the sensor/lens combination is optimized. That will mitigate the "waste" of getting rid go both the lens and sensor when upgrading.

"There are at least three major advantages of having the sensor and lens in one module, which, as this really is a new paradigm for digital cameras, I'll summarize here once again:

1. Elimination of the sensor dust problem that comes from changing lenses.

2. Providing the user with the same interface for widely different lens/sensor combinations, which is a great plus because switching between different digital cameras can be confusing: not like switching between two film cameras, like a Leica M and a Nikon F, for example. So, now, one will be able to use different camera formats, while maintaining the same user interface.

3. Optimizing the lens and sensor combination for each lens.

"The price issue raised by many people seems to me to en overblown: for some people the advantages of this revolutionary—yes, it is revolutionary—system will be worth a higher price, for others it will not.

"The success of the GXR will also be determined by how it's implemented: if the various sensor/lens modules do some things very well, and appeal to a market segment in sufficient quantity, the camera system will be successful—the market will decide.

"In my view, the GXR will eventually provide, in one camera system, several different formats in terms of sensor size and type, as well as lens type, something for which, otherwise, the user would have to purchase different digital cameras with various lenses, all of which would operate in different ways. In contrast, the GRX will provide one user interface for these various formats and lens types, which is something that I think is highly desirable. And this will be done on the basis of the Ricoh user interface, which is among the best available and on the basis of Ricoh lenses, which are excellent. It seems to me that people that are fixated on price are not recognizing, or don't need, the revolutionary aspects of the GXR system, which, indeed, is not a system designed for the mass market."

Featured Comment by Puplet: "It goes like this: digital Ricoh owners have this odd habit of spending huge amounts of money on accessories for their cameras.  The GRX makes the number of accessories that could be developed near-infinite. All Ricoh has to do to suck you in is develop one easy-to-build (relative to an entire camera) lens-sensor unit that no one else offers in a portable form, and then you'll end up buying a few more, in the idle hours of the night. I'd get a dedicated monochrome APS-C sensor if it had Ricoh 28mm GR lens (of GR1 fame) in front of it. Then, if they ever made wide-angle and telephoto options, I'd probably want those too. The GRX doesn't need to be marketed at all—if you're a nut, it sort of sells itself...."

Mike adds: Andreas made a very good point in his comment, which was that if Ricoh had just come out with a 50mm-e APS-C compact with the excellent performance this one evidently has (judging from the dpreview.com samples), for $621 less than the upcoming Leica X1, we would all be praising it...but the fact that it's part of a modular system is completely obscuring that point.

Ben Stevens from which.co.uk

(If you can't see the video, the direct link is here.)

Mike

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I ordered a new digital camera and lens for myself on Saturday night—a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 and a Lumix G 20mm ƒ/1.7 ASPH.

Isn't that blatantly inconsistent, given that I wrote, just three days ago, "my choice is clear: it's the Olympus E-P1 for me"?

Well, not really. I had both cameras and both lenses here for trial. Free to use what I pleased—and to mix and match—I preferred the Olympus E-P1 because it has body-integral IS, and the Panasonic 20mm lens because it's faster.

But that's with no financial consequences to me.

Making an actual purchase is different. The 20mm ƒ/1.7 lens cost $400, the Olympus E-P1 body, $750. That's $1150, vs. $900 for the GF1/20mm kit. And not only would I have had to pay an extra $250 to get my preferred combo, I imagine it would he harder to resell, too, since some prospective buyers would perceive it as a mismatch. In any event, I think I would be likely to be able to get a higher percentage of the GF1 kit's $900 back than the "mismatched" combo's $1150 if I were to resell either pair after a year or two.

What I did is also logical because I'm lens-centric. I choose cameras based on lenses rather than the other way around. I've always been that way. In fact, when I purchased the very first camera I ever bought for myself, in 1981, I purchased the lens first, then saved up for the body. (The lens was a Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm ƒ/1.4, the body a Contax 139Q.)

I really like the Panasonic 20mm and I could easily see keeping it long-term, using it on a succession of Micro 4/3 camera bodies.

I did say I'd never buy another camera without IS. Oh well. Maybe my next DMD will have it.

Be sensible!
Unlike many photographers—and website hosts—and many of you—I don't buy or own many cameras. I've been unemployed since 2000 and I stopped doing freelance work in 2008, so money's been pretty tight for a while. I have to be careful. Or sensible. Or at least try.

I bought the Panasonic with my own money, paid full price (plus Wisconsin State sales tax), and there's not the slightest hint of quid pro quo in place. I don't know anyone at Panasonic and I have no idea if anybody there is even aware of TOP.

Apart from a Fuji point-and-shoot that I used a couple of times and resold, the new GF1, when it gets here, will be the first digital camera I've bought since 2006, and the first new digital camera I've bought since 2004.

Mike

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Checkpoint Charlie, 1982: The famous border crossing Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse in downtown Berlin. The border crossing was meant only for foreigners who wished to travel from East to West Berlin or vice versa.

Checkpoint Charlie, 2007: The former border crossing is now a popular tourist destination: Complete with vendors selling East German paraphernalia and renting out East German "Trabant" cars.

Photos by Jürgen Ritter (spiegelonline captions)

I've always thought borders were strange places because it's a strange idea—an arbitrary line through the landscape where one "place" supposedly ends and another supposedly begins. They makes sense on maps and in our heads, but maybe not so much at the actual location where they're said to exist. The exception, of course, is when people take them very seriously, like the DMZ between North and South Korea. At those places, our conceptual world exercises its literal hold over our freedom to move about.

An interesting photo essay was published in Spiegel Online recently showing "The East-West German Border, Then and Now." The pictures show places which used to be an important conceptual demarcation but have now gone back to being merely places.

Mike
(Thanks to Cal Amari)

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Featured Comment by mcananeya: "Hooo boy! If you want to talk about borders as a strange idea and arbitrary lines, then I’m your man! I briefly lived in Zittau, Germany, which is located in what is called the 'Dreiländereck' in German (i.e., the 'three-country corner' that is the border between Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany). The only problem being that it isn’t much of a corner and the three countries don’t meet in neat, straight lines.* There is a little tongue of Poland that extends further south than the rest of Poland and separates the main area of Zittau from the Czech Republic. There is no good way to describe this in words, so take a look at this map to get a sense of what I’m talking about. 

"To get from Zittau, Germany to Hradek nad Nisou, Czech Republic by car, you needed to drive across this strip of Poland which is roughly a mile wide at the relevant point. As you left Zittau , you would first reach the German border control checkpoint. All of the people in the car would hand their passports (or national identity cards) to the driver, who would hand them to the German border control officer. He would walk off to his little hut, review the documents, stamp the passports, etc. then walk back to your car and hand everything to the driver. The gate would go up and the car would roll forward about 30 yards to the Polish border control checkpoint. The driver would hand all of the passports and ID cards to the Polish border control officer. He would walk off to his little hut, review the documents, stamp the passports, etc. then walk back to your car and hand everything to the driver. The gate would go up and you were officially in Poland! (For the next minute or two, that is.) You would then drive along a two-lane road lined on the left and the right with a) gas stations (gas was cheaper in Poland than in Germany, primarily due to lower taxes), b) shops selling cigarettes (cigarettes were cheaper in Poland than in Germany, primarily due to lower taxes) and c) stands selling garden gnomes in every form and color imaginable (because…because…well, actually, I never came up with a good reason for this). You would then roll up to…the Polish border control checkpoint, which was practically in view of the border control checkpoint you just left, hand your documents to the Polish border control officer, wait for him to review, roll forward 30 yards to the Czech border control checkpoint, have them review, etc., until finally the gate went up and you were now in the Czech Republic. After doing some shopping and having a beer, you now got back into your car and went through the whole procedure again to return to Zittau, Germany.**

"Madness. This was a fluid border and people went back and forth across it all the time, sometimes even several times a day!

"One day I expressed my amazement at this procedure to a friend of mine who gave me an odd look and asked why I didn’t just walk or bike across the border. It turns out that there was a well-known path through the woods that led directly from Zittau to Hradek. If you went by this path, you (a) went by a shorter route than the detour through Poland, and (b) didn’t have to deal with border formalities, since the checkpoint in the woods (a 1m x 1m wooden box) had been abandoned years ago! So go by car, and you go through three countries and four checkpoints and get to browse for garden gnomes, but go by foot and you go for a nice walk in nature. Makes sense to me....

"I have no idea whether any of this has changed since Poland and the Czech Republic joined the EU.

"Finally, while I was in Zittau I also occasionally taught in a nearby town which was even more bizarre from a border perspective, since the German/Polish border literally goes through the center of town! The German side is known at Görlitz, whereas the Polish side is known at Zgorzelec—same name, different spelling."

*Of course, I am sure that borders that are straight lines are generally indicative of the fact that an even more random and arbitrary border has been drawn, presumably by men poring over a map and smoking fat cigars while determining the fates of thousands of people with their rulers…

**For anyone interested in collecting stamps in their passport, this was heaven. On the other hand, these weren’t the kind of stamps that were likely to induce jealousy among friends.

Mike replies: Wow. And what's the deal with Neusatza-Spremberg? I also like the lake named Spree....

Featured Comment by Eric: "Where I live in Holland, if I need to fill up, I drive five minutes down the (Dutch) road before turning left into a German gas station. Gas is cheaper in Germany."

Featured Comment by Vladimir Riha: "Hradek nad Nisou is where I grew up (I live in Sydney now) and I often visit my family there. The border procedure was exactly like it's described above. Since Poland and Czech Republic entered into Shangan group you just drive through without any problems or stopping. Our house is less than 1 km from the spot where three countries meet. When there I often would bike ride from Czech Republic to Germany to Poland and back to Czech Republic before breakfast. Nice part of the world."

Remember how I mentioned yesterday that the little GF1 and E-P1 don't call much attention to themselves? Well, today I was driving down the road and got passed by some guys on custom motorcycles. So I grabbed the GF1 out of my pocket and snapped a few frames out the window. (See, this is the kind of thing I do, even though it results in a good picture about, oh, zero out of 1,000 times. But then, that's only so far.)

I wasn't looking where I was shooting—I was driving, going 40 mph in traffic, so I was watching the road. And the guys on the motorcycles were doing more than 40, because they were passing me. And there was an empty lane in between us. And I didn't have the camera hanging out the window—it was just pointed out the window. No chance the bikers would notice, right?

So where's he looking?

So much for unobtrusive. Pretty funny.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Damen Stephens: "I'd say you were lucky to get out of there alive—I'm sure they're used to having guns pointed at them...and they're not happy about your camera making them look 10 pounds heavier!!"

Mike adds: That made me laugh, Damen.

P.S. Here's my favorite shot from yesterday afternoon/evening's bike ride. A factory about a mile from my house. This looks better bigger, though. And it looked better last night than it looks this morning, with the bright window behind the computer monitor. Speaking of safety, I need to get lights for Gruesome.

And another from a few minutes later (sunset pictures. Yeesh):

The Fox Head 400 sign always makes me a little sad. At the bottom of it, it brags "Brewed with Waukesha Water."

Waukesha used to be famous for its water. At the 1896 (?) Columbian Exposition in Chicago, they piped in water from Waukesha for the occasion, and there is an old spa on a hill that is now a spooky Bible cult something or other, where people used to come to soak in local water, for whatever that was worth. Nowadays Waukesha's water is so polluted we're soon going to have to get it piped in from somewhere else. My water bill was almost $600 this year, and that's for a small house with two people and one dog. They're amassing money for the big public works project to come, apparently. —MJ

Featured Comment by Jon Porter: "That Fox Head 400 beer sign really took me back to my youth. I've never heard of that brand, but at one time many bars and taverns along the Chicago & Northwestern railway in Wisconsin incorporated '400' into their name. It's based on the railroad's passenger train names and boast ('400 miles in 400 minutes'). Our train in Appleton was the 'Flambeau 400' between Chicago and Green Bay. Sadly, the fleet of 400s were all gone by 1971."

Featured Comment by Ed Hawco: "Please pardon these shameless plugs of self promotion, but here goes. This brings to mind a shot I took many years ago of a soccer goalie who was watching me take his photo at the critical moment when his eye should have been on the ball.

I even showed a close-up of his face, like you did, when I put that shot on my Monday Morning Photo blog a few years ago. In that case I wasn't doing stealthy shooting. However, I have an entire other photoblog dedicated to stealthy shooting (or as I call it, 'clandestine' street photography). This is why I'm anxiously awaiting the 14mm pancake for the GF1—because I need a very wide angle lens or I'll end up with the 1000:1 ratio you mention. As it is with my 24mm (equivalent) LX3, combined with a lot of practice, I'm getting about a 25:1 failure-to-success rate (depending on how you define 'success')."