Shadowing Practice: The Ricoh GR IV is a Worthy Successor! - Learn English Speaking with Video

This is the Ricoh GR4, the latest in one of the most popular line of pocketable street cameras ever made, even going back to its analog days.

And I'm going to review this camera today.

I'm going to talk about what I like and what I don't like

and what's changed and what hasn't changed but the fact of the matter is, it doesn't really matter what I say, good or bad about this, the pre-orders are going to be nuts, everybody's going to want to buy it,

even though it's insanely expensive, that's just the way it goes with these small street cameras.

I'm Chris Nichols, this is Petapixel.

I know you've already pre-ordered this camera, so I'm just gonna tell you if that was a good decision or not.

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so let's talk about handling now Now of course leading up

to the Ricoh GR4 there's a lot of rumors going out it's going to be way smaller, all this kind of thing, thinner, lighter, all this kind of stuff.

Well

when I first picked it up I was like this feels exactly the same as the experience I had on the GR3.

So we actually went into the camera store, who we love, and they let us play with the GR3 and compare them side by side.

You can see that from a dimensional standpoint they are basically identical.

In fact the GR4 is about 5 grams heavier, 262 grams, no big deal.

you know just pushing over an eighth of a knock there

and as far as grip feel as far as like size

in your pocket it's effectively the same the only difference I

will give it it is just a couple millimeters thinner from

the back of the screen to the front of the lens

again though in practical terms I really don't think this is going to make much difference

so as far as handling goes I'm going to say it's basically the exact same

but we do have a new change to the control scheme on the back, I say new but this is actually returned to the better older system.

Gone is that terrible thumb dial that goes around the joy pad and that rocker, that back and forth rocker control, I hated that.

We have a proper command dial here, it's got a customizable press in which I like

and then we're back to the plus

and minus rocker tab here vertically oriented on the side of the thumb grip

and I think this is a way better just way to zoom into your photos, change exposure comp and of course it's all very customizable.

I mean the great The other thing about Ricoh GR cameras

and especially the return to this command structure is just

that I can manipulate basically everything I need to just using the one hand.

And this really suits it for, you know, waist level shooting or off the hip street photography using the snap focus mechanism

when you want to just get grab shots.

I just really like the way these are designed

and I think this is a return to the best control scheme that we've seen so far.

Except for this weird little button here on the side.

This switches between internal memory and external memory.

Let's talk about batteries and memory cards next.

So the battery on this is a brand new type

and this is a really important improvement because frankly the GR3's SEPA rated 200 shots on a full charge was paltry.

I mean that was really one of the big downsides.

This isn't much better but a little bit of improvements better than nothing.

This will get you up to 250 shots still not anywhere close to the sort of 300 plus

that we would often see on cameras like this

and there is a sacrifice you actually have to now go to a micro SD card

because there's no space for a full SD card slot

and look micro SD cards are fine they're fast enough there's

no issues there they're just kind of annoying I know you all agree they're kind of annoying

and you might not even have any if you've been using a lot of other cameras where SD is so ubiquitous, but you also have 54 gigs of built-in internal memory

that you can use here so you could just consider the microSD sort of a backup and forget about it.

And I'm definitely going to appreciate that extra battery life

because I am depending on this back panel LCD today

and it's a bright sunny day so I've got the brightness cranked

and that's going to hurt my battery life a little bit.

I don't have one with me but a really nice accessory is that little GR2 viewfinder.

It's not an EVF, there's no electric viewfinder option here, but that optical viewfinder sits right in line with the lens

and it's a really fun way to compose without wasting battery life.

But for me today I'm gonna be using this back panel

which by the way does not rotate in any sort of way.

We're still not getting any sort of waste level option to articulate this screen.

Hey while we're on the topic of battery life I'm turning the camera on

and off constantly because I'm trying to save battery life, you know, not waste it.

And one of the things that really got pushed around about the GR4 when it was first being announced is, oh, it's got this way faster startup time.

And it is certainly quick, right?

I can just turn it on, get a grab shot, turn it off, no big deal.

But I wanted to compare it to the older GR3.

And as you can see here, if there is a difference, it's very minor.

I mean, like, I wouldn't really worry about it.

I think the GR3 had a pretty quick startup time.

So I would say, yeah, faster, but marginally so, not really a big thing to worry about.

You know what was an issue on a lot of the GR cameras including the 3 before this camera came out?

Dust!

Dust getting inside the lens and then onto the sensor.

These are basically an integrated unit and if you have to get in there it's a full disassembly.

It's a pain in the butt.

So, Ricoh has not made this camera any better weather sealed than the GR3

but it does have a brand new sensor and lens and integrated unit and they have done some work there.

So first off, let's talk about the sensor.

This is a minor improvement now, up to the 26 megapixel APS-C sensor that we see in cameras like the Pentax Ka3 III or the Sony A6700.

And it's a great sensor, I do love it, a little bit of extra resolution never hurts.

But we also have a brand new lens, and one thing they have done is improve the actual dust seals and baffles in between the lens mechanism and the sensor.

that should help to prevent more dust getting in there.

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And also there's a special coating on the sensor which should keep that dust from sticking badly.

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And what about this lens?

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Because that is a difference as well.

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Even if it does share a lot of the same technical aspects of the lenses that came before it.

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So this is an 18.3mm f2.8.

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That's giving us like a 28mm full frame field of view equivalency.

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And I do love this focal length.

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I mean I love it for street.

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I can always crop a little bit tighter if I want.

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I like the way that it pushes the background farther away and get up close to subjects,

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so I really do like this rather than a 35mm equivalent that you find on a lot of these street cameras.

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Now the original lens was always pretty sharp

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but one issue it had was with corner sharpness

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so I did some test chart stuff here

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and I would say f2.8 in the centers is really nice

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I like it we do get a little bit more contrast

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when we start to stop down

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but the corners seem very usable now at f2.8 they do improve by stopping down by f4

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or 5.6 as you can see here they get really good but I just feel like yes overall from center to corner, this lens is giving us a little bit better consistency.

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Yeah, I've done a lot of detritus and leftover clothing.

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Jordan has a fetish about me taking pictures of leftover clothing, but I've never done a respirator before, so that's a first.

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Hey!

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Now, this is a Ricoh GR camera, so of course we see the return of an ND filter in here, which is really nice when you consider this is using that leaf shutter.

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They've set this up with a 2-stop ND, which is the same as what we've seen before, but that means that if the leaf shutter maxes out at 1.2500th of a second at f2.8,

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and maxes out at 1.4000th of a second at f5.6, and for whatever reason you still need to cut more light, this ND filter will facilitate that.

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Do I wish it was maybe stronger, you know, if I want to do long exposure or something?

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Sure, but I think they're designing this the way that Ricoh users are used to.

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So we see the return of the Ricoh Pentax accelerator technology, which is basically baked-in noise reduction even into your RAW files.

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And look, we give Canon a hard time about this all the time, so we have to give Ricoh a hard time about it too.

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I don't love baked-in noise reduction in my RAW files.

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I want to be able to make the choice to denoise afterwards.

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I'd rather my RAW files have detail and be a little bit more noisy, but what it does mean is if you're shooting at higher ISOs There's the appearance

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that just not as noisy as they normally would be and

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so I'll leave that up to you whether you're okay with that or not It's there regardless.

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You can't turn it off One thing I will say though

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at least the image stabilization being improved by another two stops

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means I don't necessarily have to crank my ISO as high as I might need to Okay, so let's talk about autofocus next which frankly has never really been Ricoh Pentax's strong seat

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And fortunately we have basically the same autofocus performance here that we've seen before.

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Single point is fine.

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I mean that's why I'm using the camera today.

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Single point, lock it, recompose and shoot.

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In that regard it's pretty quick.

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The camera does have eye detection.

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It works okay.

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But you know things like autofocus continuous performance isn't reliable.

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Tracking autofocus still tends to go off into all sorts of different directions.

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Never really stays on the subject you want.

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Especially if it's moving quickly.

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We do see however the return of Ricoh's famous snap focus.

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This is basically a Predetermined manual focus spot So

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if you find you're doing a lot of grab shots at one meter

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or one and a half meters for example You can program

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that in they've even put a new snap focus function on the mode dial up here

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And this makes it even easier to customize now I can set a distance for snap focus specifically

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but I also can say what kind of depth of field I'd like to have

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and then the camera will choose an appropriate aperture to make sure

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that I'm covered if I'm trying to shoot from the hip.

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Wait a second, who am I and why does this video suddenly sound and look bad?

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Well it's Jordan Drake to talk about the video capabilities on the Ricoh GR4 which are bad.

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This thing shoots 1080p up to 60 frames per second.

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I mean honestly Grab any smartphone you use day to day, even if it's like a decade old, it'll shoot better video than this.

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There's a great photo camera, it's a lousy video camera, don't use the video mode on it.

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I really miss the original Ricoh GR's pop-up flash.

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It was just really handy to have that, and it's so popular a look nowadays.

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So what's Ricoh doing about it?

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Well, we don't have a pop-up flash here, but there is a brand new accessory flash that you can get.

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Very slick, very low profile, has a built-in rechargeable battery, so you just top it up at home when you need to.

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And it is a true electronic flash, but there are some caveats here.

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It's not actually TTL, which is really strange.

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It does still work automatically with the GR4 to give you decent exposure.

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Rico didn't send me one, so I can't really test it for you guys, but I do know that if you use it on older GR models, it'll work, but in manual mode only.

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So, the GR series has always been fun for the occasional little close-up snap.

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You know, with a wide angle, it's fun.

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It pushes everything in the background far away.

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We're not getting amazing macro reproduction.

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I'm thinking like roughly one to four life size, but you know, we're about six centimeters away here from the subject

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and you just click it into macro mode and get your shots.

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Is this my favorite Ricoh GR camera I've used to date?

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Yes, absolutely it is because a lot of the improvements we see here are meaningful.

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I mean better sensor, yeah, better lens, better image stabilization, better battery life, video still sucks.

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That's just Ricoh.

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We don't expect any better out of my guests, but like it's a really nice pocketable camera and it does everything quite well.

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The really big downside is these cameras are getting expensive, but so is everything unfortunately.

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I mean, yeah, you could look at the GR3.

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It came out at $900.

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You know, there's been some price increases since then.

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And then the HDF versions with those diffusion filters crept up a little bit higher and stuff.

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This is $1,500 US.

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That's a good chunk of money, but it's still quite a bit more affordable than a Fujifilm X106 is.

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And what does the price really matter when these things are going to be pre-ordered all to hell, you're going to barely be able to get one and they're going to sell every one they make.

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I mean, it just seems to be that pocketable street cameras are so popular right now that it's a seller's market.

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Well look, it's a cool little camera and if you've got one of these on pre-order, I think you've made a solid choice.

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Get five, sell the rest on eBay, I don't know, make some profit.

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Why not?

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That's what we do nowadays.

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Do I wish it was weather sealed?

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Sure, but we've had a beautiful day today.

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Do I wish it's going to be better for dust?

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I hope so, but I'm not going to throw in a bag of flour to find out.

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So if you do get one of these, throw in a bag of flour and then let us know in the comments below is this actually more dust repellent.

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We'd really love to have that feedback as well as any other feedback you have.

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We appreciate you guys watching the show as always and we'd love it if you also watch the podcast.

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You can watch it on this exact same channel in glorious video

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or you can listen to it on all your favorite podcasting apps.

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Hey, while you're at it, why not consider a Petapixel.com membership.

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$3 a month, $30 a year.

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You get big discounts on KH.com.

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You get discounts on our merch store, you get free access to all of our JPEG and raw sample gallery files that you can play with.

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So definitely check that out.

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It helps us do some really cool stuff.

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Thanks for joining us.

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We'll see you soon with more on Petapixel.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: The Ricoh GR IV is a Worthy Successor! - Learn English Speaking with Video

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What is the Shadowing Technique?