Ricoh wants your shooting experiences to be creative and plentiful. Instead of feeling weighed down by your camera, Ricoh wants you to be ready and able to capture the moment when it happens. Their GR DIGITAL IV Digital Camera is a testament to the company's efforts in this vein. Featuring a compact magnesium body that fits in your pocket, the GR DIGITAL IV is a revamped and upgraded version of its predecessor, the GR DIGITAL III.

Not quite a point-and-shoot, but not a DSLR, the GR DIGITAL IV blends both worlds, giving you many rabbit holes to follow to your creative heart's content. When it comes to exposure control modes the camera features program shift AE, aperture priority (A), manual exposure (M), and shutter priority (S). An upgrade on its predecessor, the DIGITAL IV also provides you with the option to shoot in bulb (b) and time (T) modes, for longer exposures. These options open up entire worlds of possibilities, such as can be found in night time shooting, experiments with motion blur, and more. Of course, multiple auto modes allow you to shoot at will, and forget about settings. The camera lets you combine up to 5 photos in a multiple exposure mode, capture star trails, and shoot in macro, among many other options.

The camera's hybrid autofocus system combines an external auto focus with a conventional contrast autofocus system. With calculations for up to 190 points, the camera only needs 0.2 seconds to adjust, allowing for rapid shooting. Another user-friendly feature - AF Continuous Shooting - instructs the camera to take a series of photos while adjusting its focus on the subject. Among the multiple other features you'll also find useful options like auto-bracket functions, positive film and Bleach Bypass Image Setting modes, level and image setting corrections in-camera, electronic leveling, and much, much more. Of course, like most all digital cameras in this realm, the DIGITAL IV also gives you the option to shoot video as well.

In addition to all that the GR DIGITAL IV is a respectable 10Mp camera with a 1/1.7" CCD image sensor and Ricoh's upgraded GR ENGINE IV image processing engine. This camera produces detailed, vibrant images that will look great on the computer screen, in print, or on your HDTV. The processor does more than quickly transmit file data to the inserted memory card, it also works to reduce image noise, controls the white balance function, and helps to stabilize and produce a wide range of colors in your photographs, among other duties.

The camera wouldn't be able to do any of this, however, without the 6mm (28mm in 35mm equivalent) f/1.9 GR lens. This lens is a high contrast, low distortion vehicle for capturing precise images. Other tools that are necessary to the camera include the 3.0" LCD. This monitor is an improvement on the previous generation's display with a 1.7x increase in maximum brightness. The camera is compatible with SD / SDHC and Eye-Fi memory cards for recording the JPEG and RAW images and AVI / MJPEG video you capture. When ambient or other continuous lighting isn't enough or isn't available, you can make use of the camera's built-in flash. The GR DIGITAL IV also has ISO settings up to 3200.