Compared to...

Studio scene comparison (RAW)

See previous page for RAW conversion notes.

This is our standard studio scene comparison shot taken from exactly the same tripod position. Lighting: daylight simulation, >98% CRI. Crops are 100%. Ambient temperature was approximately 22°C (~72°F). Camera settings as per previous pages.

Ricoh A12 50mm vs. Leica X1

Ricoh GXR/A12 50mm	Leica X1
4.4 MB JPEG (4288 x 2848)	4.8 MB JPEG (4272 x 2856)

In theory equalizing the image processing from raw in this fashion (and especially the sharpening) should demonstrate that, due to the cameras' very similar sensors, the Ricoh GXR/A12 50mm's output is very close to that of the Leica X1. In practice we see a different thing though. The Ricoh's RAW conversion is fairly soft and actually shows less detail than both the out-of-camera JPEGs and the Leica X1's RAW output shown on this page.

So, while the X1's DNG files are both more detailed, and visually more appealing, than the camera's JPEGs the Ricoh images unusually lose some quality in our RAW conversion workflow that is detailed above. This and the fact that we've been able to create more detailed results with other RAW converters (see RAW page of this review) leads to the conclusion that ACR's RAW conversion routines for the GXR are not fully optimized (yet). Quite a substantial amount of extra sharpening over our usual RAW workflow is needed to squeeze an acceptable level of detail and sharpness out of the images.