With all these smart and advanced features, it's rather surprising that Ricoh hasn't built in aperture-priority, shutter-priority and manual modes to tempt serious photographers, especially given this little camera's build quality and zoom range.
Dodgy lens
The zoom is where it all goes slightly wrong. The original CX1 produced decent-enough images from its 9.3-megapixel CMOS sensor and 7x zoom, but the CX2's just not as good. The CX2 produces adequate detail in the centre of the frame but poor definition at the edges, especially on the right-hand side.
This is combined with a degree of image-smoothing that often swamps finer textures, even at low ISOs. Ricoh really needs to take another look at this lens and the image-processing, because, good as the CX2 might otherwise be, if the image quality's not there, it's all pointless.
Conclusion
The Ricoh CX2 is a very interesting camera. It's responsive, well-made and combines a high continuous-shooting speed with an unusual degree of focus control. But, while the use of a 9.3-megapixel CMOS sensor is fine in itself, the image quality we got from our camera was disappointing.
Edited by Charles Kloet
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