[This post was drafted in early 2024. As of December 2025 I have cleaned it up and added a bit of new information with the intention of writing a Part II with comparison images]
Three things that defined my childhood were Music, Radio, and Photography. This was almost completely due to the influence of my father and my grandfather. My grandfather had started in photography in the 1920’s, developing his own roll film and making prints in a home darkroom. He started by installing electrical extensions in homes where the only electrical was one plug in the parlor. Later he worked as a projectionist, and then he started a “mom and pop” Radio, TV and Appliance store. It was literally mom and pop as he ran it with my grandmother. As a result our home was littered with radios and electronics. I started with a little transistor AM radio and unwittingly got into AM DX as I followed Boston Red Sox games while they were on the road.
Another thing my grandfather had was a darkroom. He picked up photography as a young man and that carried on to my father and then to me. I learned how to develop black and white film, and got to spend time in the darkroom learning to make basic prints. My grandfather started out on something like a Kodak Brownie but quickly switched to 35mm roll film cameras like the affordable Argus C-line. Both my grandfather and my father were low-tech photographers. An internal light meter was a luxury! As such, I was given a Yashica Lynx rangefinder with a dodgy shutter and broken meter as my first real camera. Little did I know I was learning Shutter Priority mode as only the 1/30, 60, and 125 shutter settings seemed to work. Later on I scraped together the cash for an Olympus OM-G and had a SLR with a working shutter and light meter! What joy.
I’ll be the first to admit that I had no style as a photographer. It took me a long time to get beyond snapshots. It wasn’t until I started using a digital camera that I had the kind of immediate feedback I needed. That’s not much as admissions go but I learned a lot about what kinds of processes I feel engaged with. In music I prefer live performance where the feedback is immediate, and similarly with amateur radio. But it was digital photography where I could have the immediate feedback while using a camera. I think my first digital camera was a Nikon point and shoot. It was poor on specs but a fun camera anyhow. I went through various compact (cheap) digital cameras and then I got a used Nikon APS-C DX format DSLR camera (D50, D200, D300). Those were very good cameras and relatively affordable. I shot with those cameras for years. They were bulky and heavy, but very reliable. Looking for something lighter led me to the Olympus Micro Four Thirds system. These cameras had a good sensor with a 50% crop factor (20mm lens is equivalent to 40mm on a 35mm full-frame sensor. The compact size and relative affordability was reminiscent of why I was drawn to the Olympus 35mm film cameras 30 years earlier. They were small, light, capable, and had excellent lenses.
I’d say the lens selection for m4/3 is as good any any camera system in production, with the exception of the Nikon F-Mount system. Even the plastic-ish kit lenses are sharp and bright, if not especially fast. The sensors are not great at high ISO, but the in-body image stabilization (IBIS) is among the best available. I shoot almost entirely handheld so this is a huge benefit. I can run longer shutter speeds and keep the ISO lower. After a trying a few other lenses my main setup has been a Olympus EM-1 MK-II with the 14-40mm and 40-150mm PRO zoom lenses. They fit perfectly in a Think Tank sling bag and cover everything I need in focal length with a constant f/2.8 aperture. Compared to my Nikon gear the Oly setup was lighter, more versatile, shot better video, and the lenses were as good an anything I used from Nikon. That bag has traveled the world with me and I took a lot of good photos with it.
And then a funny thing happened… I shot some film with my trusty Olympus 35SP rangefinder. I was back to a fixed lens camera with a 42mm f/1.7 lens, almost exactly the focal length I used in my old Yashica. Sure, film is getting nothing but more expensive and processing is eye-watering costly, but the feel of a simple camera with a “normal lens” was immensely satisfying.
I picked up a used Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 “pancake lens” to use on my Olympus, and while I loved the images I could never be friends with the slow autofocus in low light. It isn’t a great performer on Panasonic/Lumix cameras, but it gets even worse when that lens is mounted on a non-Panasonic camera. But the idea was set.
Meanwhile I was also reviewing thousands of images in my Adobe Lightroom library and doing a lot of culling. Digital has the advantage of letting me make a lot of exposures without fearing the time and cost of processing, but that also means I have a trove of bad images in there. As soon as I started that project I was confronted with the reality that I wasn’t happy with a lot of my images, even the technically solid ones. doing a review of 20 years worth of digital images is a great way to take a step back and think about what you really want out of photography. Sure, there are the travel photos, the special moments with loved ones, the special places and faces. Of course that is essential and something I would not change. But there are also many times when I was using those nice zoom lenses and the results were not great.
So I did two things: I put that 20mm Panny onto my EM-1 and started shooting with it again; and I started looking at fixed lens compacts. The Panny is as I remember it. It makes beautiful images, but as soon as the light dims the autofocus heads for the exits. I loved the compact feel of ditching the big zoom for a pancake lens, and I loved the way it brought my focus back to the composition instead of “zoom to compose”.
On the search for a compact camera there were a few options that rose to the surface immediately: Fujifilm rangefinder style compacts with the X100v sitting at the top of the heap; The Sony RX-100 VII with insane autofocus and exposure capability and a superzoom lens; Canon G series camera of which I have owned a few and like them; and this oddball camera from Ricoh called the GR III. I had seen the GR before, and I knew Ricoh because my dad had a Ricoh 35mm SLR that used Pentax K-mount lenses. The Ricoh full manual SLR was about the least expensive point of entry into 35mm SLR in the 70’s and into the 80’s. It was even cheaper than the Pentax K-1000, the cockroach of the camera world (durability and ubiquity, not revulsion).
Any research into the Ricoh GR III immediately brings you into the world of street photography because it combines a 24mp full frame sensor and excellent image quality with a pocket sized basic-black point and shoot that looks like a toy. On the street this is akin to a secret weapon where you look like a clueless tourist but you are getting the good stuff. Subjects who might recoil at the sight of a “real” camera just go about their business when you point this little chunk of camera at them. It is also seen as a good alternative to the “unobtanium” status of the Fuji X100-V, a camera in low supply commanding twice it’s sticker price. The Fuji is a great tool, though it isn’t actually compact like “in your pocket” compact. Styling-wise it is a dead-ringer for the rangefinder classics of the 50’s through the 70’s, which I love. Sadly it also has a certain hipster cachet that has helped pump up the street price. The list price is about $1300 USD but finding one for under $2000 is rare. Also, at that $2k+ point many photographers start looking at Leica as an option, as opposed to looking for cheaper alternatives.
At the end my decision came down to the Sony RX100 vs the Ricoh GR. Simply, the Fuji wasn’t small enough and the Canon wasn’t going to give me the image quality I wanted. The Sony is an excellent camera and I have pixel-peeped some raw files and I think it is the best 1″ sensor camera out there, but one of my goals was to make a step up from the IQ of the 20mp Micro 4/3 sensor in the Olympus. It’s not that the Oly is bad, it is actually a great sensor and Olympus packages it with great technology and lens selection. The problem I have is the resolution/look for the actual digital negatives. I shoot in RAW+JPG and edit my RAW files in Adobe Lightroom (actually now Luminar Neo). The Olympus RAWs are just what you would want. They can take a lot of manipulation and hold up great to any kind of preset edits. It turns out that I’m not a true “pixel peeper” but I found some of the Oly images wanting.
So that leaves the Ricoh, and I decided that the GR IIIx was the way to go. I like shooting wide, and I can see where a pure street photographer could make use of the extra width of the 28mm GR III even just for some wiggle room on framing/cropping when shooting from the hip. But I wanted to go back to the boring days of a fixed normal lens and the IIIx is the best option for me.
About two months later I was in a local (since closed) camera shop, yes a real camera shop, and they had a Sony RX-100VA for a very good price. After not much thought I purchased the Sony and now have a little competition going on.
In the next post I’ll put together a mini review and my first impressions. Thanks for reading. P
petebrunelli 
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