Picture Quality

Picture quality
Colour balance issues
After developing an immediately favourable impression of the Caplio GX hardware and specifications, we had high hopes for the image quality from the camera – especially as it has the tremendously useful advantage of an extra-wide angle lens.

Unfortunately, our hopes were not to be founded. The first thing we noticed was an overly cool colour balance and a tendency to over-expose, causing bleached highlights.


In this shot, the sky is an unnatural blue and much of the highlight detail has been lost. Fringing in the shadow on the mid-top left (see below) is quite visible too.


Purple fringing wasn't always present, but at times it did make itself felt.
Noise
Another affliction suffered by the Caplio GX is noise. Even at the camera's lowest ISO setting of 64, noise is easily found. It's worst in the blue channel as one might expect. In the picture below, the shadowed areas of the boat highlighted actually revealed very poor blotchy noise artefacts when printed.


This shot was taken in late afternoon sun and yet the shadows are blue-ish and when you look closely there is a lot of noise (below), especially when printed.


Despite the brightness of the scene, the camera insisted on setting an ISO as high as 125.
It appears that a lot of in-camera sharpening takes place, emphasising the inherent noise.

Flash
Flash pictures were adequate, rather than inspiring. The Caplio GX's odd colour balance makes itself felt here too. At the same time, if you have flash enabled, on power up or if you enable flash after the camera has been switched on, while the flash charges up the camera locks you out. This became very tiresome indeed.


With flash illumination the Caplio GX renders skin tones too yellow and that wall in the background is supposed to be light pink. In fact all the colours are too muted and there is a lack of contrast.
White balance
Starting with white balance performance, the Caplio GX had mixed results. Here we compare it with a Samsung U-CA 3 (left), with the Ricoh on the right:


AWB on, tungsten illumination
Compared to the Ricoh Caplio GX, the Samsung Digimax U-CA 3 produced a more neutral result in tungsten (ordinary light bulb) light with its auto white balance setting.


AWB on, fluorescent illumination
Both cameras did a commendable job of neutralising fluorescent light in auto white balance mode, with only a touch of green in the grey patches on the colour chart marking the Samsung down.


Menu preset for fluorescent illumination
Neither camera did a good job when using a preset for fluorescent light.

Menu preset for tungsten illumination
Using a preset for tungsten light, the Samsung gets it right while the Ricoh remains a tad too warm.
Resolution

Another poor result for the Caplio GX. The chart compares poorly with some 4MP cameras we have tested.

Macro
At last we have something cheerful to say about the Caplio GX's picture taking abilities – close focus mode. You can get really close!


The Caplio RX gets incredibly close but as you can see above, at the closest point the lens starts to interfere with the lighting and distortion is plain to see.

Getting close can result in some crisp detail, though once again the colours could be better saturated. The blurred background tones are so compressed they almost appear posterised.