Another charity shop special, I bought this based on Ricoh's reputation and the fact that I recently acquired a Ricoh digital which impressed me greatly. This model, however, is a completely different story. The handling is very nice, it's well designed ergonomically, it has a bright viewfinder and has a good level of functionality. Performance is where it falls down. It has one of those rubberized shutter buttons which have a tendency to cause camera shake because there's no "feel" to it, the tendency is to press to hard which moves the camera. Ricoh has recently been acclaimed for it's incredible macro capability, down to 1cm, and as this has a super macro function I was hoping for some really good close ups. However, when the super macro is activated it automatically turns on the flash and it can't be disabled, why? At this range this is guaranteed to cause cause the subject to burn out whilst blacking the background and this is exactly what happens. Also on the performance front the metering struggles with even relatively simple lighting situations causing highlights to blow out and creating very dark shadows. I have struggled to put up a respectable gallery but there are a few which I would regard as passable if not special. All together I'm not impressed by this model from the Ricoh stable so I don't see it getting much exercise.