Product Reviews

Ricoh's R30 ticks all the right boxes for an affordable, general-purpose digital camera: it has a 5-megapixel sensor, compact aluminium body, 2.5" LCD screen and a lithium-ion battery.

The lens has a 5.7x zoom range and stretches from a wide-angle 28mm to 160mm (35mm-equivalent) focal length. Battery life is also good. The camera is fast at taking pictures, too, at just over a second between shots without the flash and under two seconds with it. The continuous mode managed 50 shots in 30 seconds. The physical design

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could be better; the lens makes quite a racket when zooming and seems unstable at its full extension. There's no dust cover for the USB and AV sockets, and the flash is below the shutter release button so it risks being obscured by errant fingers.

There's no direct control over aperture or shutter speed, but the options included are easy to use, with quick access to exposure compensation, white balance and ISO speed. Scene presets such as Portrait and Sports have helpful descriptions of what they do and how best to use them. One of these, Skew Correct, can crop and straighten the edges of printed material.

Image quality tests revealed less vibrant colours than with other cameras, but pictures were sharp and well exposed. The macro mode gave sharp focus at just 1cm from the subject. The only disappointments were excessive image noise at ISO settings higher than 100, a flash that struggles to illuminate larger subjects and a video mode that's limited to 320x240 resolution.

Image quality is decent rather than exceptional, but overall the R30 is a balanced camera at an attractive price