RICOH GR III Camera Review

The RICOH GR III is incredibly portable and lightweight, especially considering it has an APS-C sensor and in-body image stabilization (IBIS). Even with its lens fully extended, it maintains a sleek profile. Of course, that portability comes at the expense of certain features, so there's no viewfinder or tilting screen. If you're looking for a highly compact camera but prefer an interchangeable lens design, consider the Fujifilm X-M5.

The camera has good overall build quality. It has a magnesium alloy chassis with a minimalist design. Most of the buttons feel solid, and the mode dial is rigid enough that you won't accidentally change modes. That said, the rear control wheel feels a bit flimsy, and the lens design means that dust and debris can get into the lens mechanism if you aren't careful. It also isn't weather-sealed.

• RICOH GR III camera
• 1x RICOH DB-110 battery
• AC adapter
• USB-A to USB-C cable
• Hot shoe cover
• Wrist strap
• User manual

The RICOH GR III has decent ergonomics. It'll feel cramped if you have larger hands, but considering how portable it is, the controls are well thought out, with two command dials and an exposure compensation switch, as well as several buttons, that can be customized to suit your preferences. The shutter button also provides good physical feedback. With all that, you can comfortably shoot the camera one-handed. The small bump and textured grip provide a secure hold as well, despite being very narrow. On the other hand, the fixed screen and lack of viewfinder are a bit limiting, especially if you want to shoot from the waist or from above. If you'd prefer a camera with a viewfinder and more physical controls, consider other premium compact cameras like the Leica D-Lux 8 or Fujifilm X100VI.

This camera doesn't have a viewfinder. If you prefer to compose photos through a viewfinder, consider the Fujifilm X100VI.

The screen is fixed, which is limiting if you like to shoot from different angles. It has a decent resolution, however, and gets very bright, which is necessary to ensure you can see the screen even on sunny days, since there's no viewfinder to rely on. You can use the touchscreen to navigate the menu, select focus points, or actuate the shutter.

The menu system is extensive, with a lot of different submenus and options. However, it uses simple language and is well-organized, making it easy to navigate. Pressing the 'ADJ' dial gives you access to a customizable quick menu, which is good for adjusting frequently used settings. Unfortunately, there's no guide or info function to explain settings in-camera, but thankfully, most settings are pretty straightforward.

The built-in lens has a fixed 28mm full-frame equivalent focal length, which is wide enough to give you more coverage in busier scenes but versatile enough for other subjects as well. It has a relatively wide max aperture of f/2.8, so you have some flexibility in low light, although it's one stop less than the lens on the comparable Fujifilm X100V. The lens also has a built-in neutral density (ND) filter that lets you shoot at slower shutter speeds for longer exposures or use a larger aperture than you would be able to otherwise when shooting in brighter conditions.

If you prefer to shoot with a narrower field of view, the RICOH GR IIIx is identical to the RICOH GR III except for its lens, which has a 40mm equivalent focal length. The newer HDF variants of each model also trade their ND filters for highlight diffusion filters.

The RICOH GR III is one of the few fixed-lens cameras with an APS-C sensor. It has a relatively high resolution and wide ISO range.

The camera's battery life is disappointing. It's CIPA-rated for about 200 shots on a full charge, which isn't much. Of course, given its compact size, that's to be expected. If you're taking it out for longer shooting days, you'll likely need a spare battery or power bank, though real-world usage will vary depending on your settings and how you use the camera.

In video mode, the battery life is atrocious. Shooting video drains the battery quite quickly, with just over half an hour of recording time before it dies. Even before you reach that point, the camera is likely to overheat and interrupt your recording as well. You also can't power the camera externally while recording.

The RICOH GR III only has one continuous shooting mode that shoots at 4 fps, and there's no electronic shutter option. It's quite slow, but if you're shooting in JPEG, the camera writes the photos to the SD card fast enough that you can effectively shoot indefinitely. If you shoot in RAW format, on the other hand, the buffer fills up after about 20 frames, which isn't much. Thankfully, the buffer is pretty quick to empty.

The camera's continuous autofocus tracking feature does a poor job of tracking moving subjects. With the camera's slow max burst rate and sluggish tracking, you're unlikely to get many in-focus frames with a quick subject. On top of that, you can't disable the image preview function, even when shooting continuously, which makes it a lot harder to track a subject in live view, as the previous shot is previewed in the display while shooting the next frame. Ultimately, this camera is not well-suited to that kind of continuous shooting.

Even without using the tracking feature, it's difficult to maintain focus on a moving subject when using a single center focus point. You'll get some usable frames, but given the camera's wider field of view, limited burst mode, and sluggish autofocus, it becomes tricky to maintain focus when a subject is moving.

That said, it does have a unique 'Snap Focus' feature that quickly 'snaps' the focus to a preset distance with a full press of the shutter when enabled. That means if you can reliably gauge your distance to a subject, you can easily capture quick in-focus snapshots.

Remarkably, given its compact size, the RICOH GR III features in-body image stabilization (IBIS). It's a 3-axis IBIS system, and it works really well to add some stability when shooting handheld. You can capture clear shots at very slow shutter speeds, which can be very helpful when shooting in low light. It's still worth noting that stabilization performance can vary depending on different factors, including how steady your hands are.

The dynamic range is great. It's quite well-suited to shooting high-contrast scenes, retaining a wide range of detail in both the shadows and highlights, though it isn't quite as good as most larger sensor cameras.

Note: At f/4, the camera's max shutter speed is 1/2500s. To measure the camera's dynamic range at a 1/4000s exposure time (with an ISO of 8000), we had to deviate from our usual methodology and use an aperture setting of f/5.6.

The camera captures very sharp photos, with a lot of fine detail. While you won't have as much leeway to crop in as higher-resolution sensors, you still have some room to crop without losing too much visible sharpness. We found that images are sharpest on this camera when its built-in lens is set to f/4.

The camera has fantastic noise management in low light, with remarkably clean photos at various exposure levels. We suspect this is because of in-camera noise reduction that can't be disabled. After updating the camera to firmware V1.81, our RAW noise test results improved and are more in line with those of the RICOH GR IIIx, with the same apparent noise reduction being applied to the camera's RAW files and skewing our dB measurements in Imatest.

The RICOH GR III has very limited video features. It can only record at up to 1080p resolution and doesn't have any advanced features like Log recording or even an HDMI port to connect an external display. When recording video, the camera also incurs a 1.2x crop compared to its photo mode.

The RICOH GR III can record FHD video at up to 60 fps, which is great if you want to record everything from more cinematic-looking footage to fast action or moderate slow-motion footage.

The camera doesn't have very impressive internal recording specs. Its bit rates are quite limited, so it can't record a very large amount of information. It also caps recording at 25 minutes or whenever your file reaches 4GB, depending on which you hit first. Even though it only records in 1080p, the camera is also prone to overheating, with about three overheating interruptions during the half hour or so during which we tested its video battery life.

While this camera supports continuous autofocus in video mode, it doesn't have any automatic tracking features, meaning the user has to manually select different focus points using the touchscreen. In 'Auto' mode, the focus kept chasing and pulsing, and it was difficult for the lens to establish focus, although the focus transitions were relatively smooth.

Video quality is poor overall. It's passable in brighter lighting conditions, but video still looks soft and somewhat grainy, with some chromatic aberration. In low light, footage is significantly noisy, with a lot of muddy-looking details.

The rolling shutter effect isn't too heavy. You'll still see some skewing or wobbling with quicker camera pans and movement, but it's relatively minimal otherwise.

The RICOH GR III has poor dynamic range in video. Its video features are extremely limited, and you can only shoot video in 'Program' mode, rather than having full manual exposure controls. For that reason, we had to adjust our methodology to measure the dynamic range by changing the camera's exposure compensation setting and measuring at different EV values rather than different ISO settings.

Ultimately, the camera simply can't capture a very wide range of shadows and highlights. You'll lose a lot of detail to noise in the shadows, and bright highlights will clip when shooting scenes with higher contrast or in challenging lighting conditions.

Tested settings:

• Resolution: 1080p
• Frame Rate: 30 fps
• Log Format: N/A

The camera's overall dynamic range is limited, and there's no manual exposure mode in video, so the amount of stops you'll get above and below middle gray stays roughly consistent no matter how you set the exposure compensation.

Tested settings:

• Resolution: 1080p
• Frame Rate: 30 fps
• Log Format: N/A

The camera has just a single SD card slot, rated for UHS-I cards, and it's located inside the battery compartment on the bottom of the camera. On top of that, it has about 2GB of internal memory, which may be useful if you run out of space on your SD card on the go.

The camera has limited inputs. There's a USB-C port for charging and file transfer, and that's about it, aside from wireless connectivity through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.