I'm sorry Ricoh, I loved your GRD range of camera but this seems a short sighted idea. I think people wanting one unit that can have different over-priced lenses (because they are included with a new sensor each time) is not going to catch on. If people want real quality from a camera and lens system they are not likely to pick this over a proper DSLR which will do everything twice as good for equal or less money.

So it's either an over priced compact or an under-performing SLR?... I just don't get it!

I used to have a GRD (mk I) and they are nice cameras, although that early model was slow as hell for saving RAW files! The fixed focal length should give better IQ than it does but the buttons are great and it's zero shutter lag for street photos is awesome! They seem to have improved a few things on the newer models but... After seeing the images from the Panasonic LX3 the new Ricoh seems a bit boring and inferior.

The LX3 has better high ISO performance, a wider lens, a bit of an optical zoom, actually has exposure bracketing (although still a bit crap). The f/2.0 lens is not vastly different from the f/1.9 of the Ricoh. The LCD is not as high res and it doesn't quite have the Ricoh's 180 second long exposure mode but it's a much nicer looking camera that costs a bit over half the price of the Ricoh. For me the Ricoh fails in too many areas to justify that massive price, if I can find one, my next purchase will be the LX3.

I had the GRD mkI and it was a nice street photographers camera, great controls and shutter lag but the RAW write times were 13 seconds!! and in that time you could take another shot. That totally ruined the camera and they did address that with the GRD mkII a bit. I hope they have gone much further with the mkII but I see no mention of it. I like that they don't compromise with the lens by keeping it a wide prime but the lens quality and noise quality from the tiny sensor has been rather disappointing considering their goal for this camera with the previous 2 versions. I think Panasonic (& to a lesser extent Leica) wiped the floor with them with the LX3 (and D-LUX4) and that's a shame. I don't see any improvements in spec here accept the slight boost to the aperture. The shutter speed is still a measely 1/2000th, exposure bracketing is crippled to 1/2 stops max just like always. I am glad they stuck with 10mp but lower would be nicer (3-5) as you get no benefit with small sensor compacts over this amount but 720p video would be nice. So far they are not taking my attention away from the LX3. The price for the GRD mkIII is rediculous!!!!!

I have the titanium version of this and I can't say the white look is something that made me wish I had waited, it just looks odd =/.

I noticed how the X-series Sony got a "What would you change about the ------" section on Engadget and it got hundreds of replies, mostly bitchy but I'm curious what people would say about the S9 in this regard as it does most things better than the Sony (FLAC, APE, OGG, WMV lossless as well as gapless for those, bigger screen, better video codec support, much better battery life) and for the same price. I really love this machine! (customisable UI rocks!!!), I bet a lot of other people would love it too, if only they knew about it.

I would have considered buying it over the Cowon S9 if it had supported at least 1 type of lossless audio (The Cowon supports 4 types, but still not Apple). I have owned several Sony's before and been kinda happy but this one pushed me to Cowon and I'm really glad now. The general audio quality is better on the Cowon S9 and the lossless just blows the Sony out of the water! Cowon's OLED is noticably bigger too. Also unlike Cowon the Sony doesnt support gapless playback'.

The only thing I can think of about the Sony that I like is that it also has a radio and it's got slightly nicer build quality but that's about it, for everything else, buy a Cowon S9.

I have a D3 and am thoroughly impressed. As far as I can see the only point of the D3X over that is for studio work. Does it warrent the price? well no but then studio professional can just afford this kind of thing (although would probably have a digital Hasselblad anyway). I don't see the point of the D3X's resolution, it's only a bad thing when the files need to be stored, transferred, manipulated etc. Per pixel sharpness is just not as good as the D3, neither is the low light capability or the speed which is useful for fast moving subjects, HDR etc.

The only down side of the D3X is price but does it matter? No. For 90% of people the D3 is literally better although it's not exactly cheap, it is worth it. The D3X is there to satisfy idiotic pixel junkies in my opinion. Video would be nice but who ever says it needs autofocus needs to think, and then slap themselves in the face!!

It's true that this is not a 14mp camera... It's, at last, a true resolution of 4.7mp but at the same time. A 5D, D3, D700 are not true 12mp cameras and the 5D mkII, 1Ds mkIII are not true 21mp cameras etc. etc. You have to give it to Sigma for claiming it's better than it is because most people do not know that every other camera manufacturer interpolates their colours when Sigma do not.

So given the current state of marketing dependant, undereducated consumers in regards to image tech I do not blame Sigma at all for saying this is a 14mp camera.

It may have a fixed lens but I for one think this is a much more usable one. I love the idea of it being a fixed focal length for quality and the extra stop of aperture is also making this beast much more attractive to me. I really like the sound of this camera now but it will still hinge on it's ability to AF or at least be able to usably MF. It also needs to have 0 shutter lag (minus AF of course). Woow, a nice realistic and high quality 4.6mp full RGB RAW file with a decent lens in a compact shell.... awesome (and I don't say that often about new camera tech). Well done Sigma!!!

I have not seen any written resources on pixel quality. The opinions I expressed about mega pixels are mostly from my own findings after owning various digital cameras. It helps to be able to processes these images yourself from RAW* files but there are a lot of resources floating around on the internet for you to find high quality images. Review sites such as DPReview are very good, Flickr can be very useful and even sites like PBase but manufacturers samples often don't tell you a lot as they are often studio lit and thus don't reflect the quality that a normal user can achieve.

*I say RAW files because I don't trust compressed files that come out of any camera. These jpgs are often sharpened, saturated, reduced for noise, colour corrected and then spat out at a highly compressed 8bit image. The images I produce always need some kind of work done to them so if I were to use jpgs for capture then I would be compressing it twice thus loosing even more detail than the base 8bit file. RAW files are 12-16bit which means their exposure value can be tweaked in software to retain highlight and shadow detail. White balance can be altered without loosing any detail and sharpening can be done properly with on an image by image basis depending on what you decide something needs rather than by a set amount, as can saturation and all before dropping to a perfect 8bit file for displaying on the web or whatever.

Camera's with small sensors and huge amounts of mega-pixels are unable to make high quality images because the sensor for each pixel is now so small that it's difficult to get reliable light levels in them without huge amounts of signal to noise ratio. Manufacturers like to push the mega-pixels of these tiny sensor machines to make them sound better than what they are. of course you can capture less in lossy jpg format but not in RAW. That is until Canon invented the sRAW (I assume 'Small RAW') file type which usually divided the amount of pixels captured by the RAW by 4 (2.5mp instead of 10mp). This was done because only 1 in 4 pixels is a red or blue and so dividing this way could keep the alias matrix the same and in theory improve your image quality through a higher signal to noise ratio. This would also save on file size which is all good.

I had a G9 and it was a good 'little' camera but the resolution annoyed me. I used to downsize the RAWs to 3mp from 12 and the images were much better but still not perfect quality. sRAW would have been brilliant actually but now we have 15mp?!!! and still no sRAW, this is insane!! Typical marketing scum driven specification for idiots who don't know how pixels work. Hands up who thinks that 15mp was a good idea, go on, I dare you =P

Oh the wider lens was a nice touch but this camera model is stale now, it's crying out for a bigger sensor. Please Canon, or whoever... Larger sensor with less pixels in a point and shoot!!