Epson’s R-D1 rangefinder is even more retro than you might have imagined. We’ve finally held one, examined it closely and have detailed information about its conception and even price.
Click
here for the official Epson press release.
This article has been updated - see additional pictures and captions below and additional page
here.
Discuss the Epson R-D1 on the dpnow.com forum.
Yes, this really is a digital camera
At a briefing this afternoon in London, Epson answered a lot of the questions that were being asked after Epson
displayed several mysterious prototype Leica-style rangefinder digital cameras at the PMA show in Las Vegas last month.
Photo-i's Vincent Oliver gives some scale to the R-D1, which is ar elatively large digital camera
At the time, Epson was saying nothing more than that the project was a joint one with camera manufacturer, Cosina and that it would be compatible with interchangeable lenses designed for use with Leica rangefinder bodies. We didn’t even know if the cameras were destined for production.
Now we do know. Epson officially launched the R-D1 in Japan two weeks ago, but today we got to play with a prototype, though it was not working and so no pictures could be taken. However, further down this page is a set of pictures taken, believe it or not, on a table in a West End restaurant, of the R-D1, earlier this afternoon and these should give you a good impression of this most unusual of cameras.
Here's another shot of Vincent with the R-D1 from a different angle.
Pricing and availability
The Epson R-D1, body only, will go on sale some time this summer for an approximate price of €3,000, or about £2,000 or US$3,500. We were told that only 10,000 would be made and perhaps half of these will sold in Japan, so if you want one desperately, you will need to be quick off the mark.
The R-D1 is remarkable in a number of ways. First of all, it’s the only digital rangefinder camera in existence. Its retro looks are not just skin-deep. What looks like the film advance lever isn’t just cosmetic – you need to operate it to re-cock the shutter after each picture is taken – this even saves battery power. What used to be the film rewind knob now functions as a jog dial for making settings adjustments. There is no host PC connection, USB or otherwise. It seems like an SD memory card slot was grudgingly incorporated into the retro design – a compact flash slot was ruled out because it would have taken up too much space, apparently.
Notable digicam features left out
You won’t find autofocus or digital zoom on the R-D1 and you can’t view live through the lens even though a good-sized 2 inch 235,000 pixel reversible colour monitor is built into the back of the camera. There is no video capture mode and nor is there a TV-out socket. Epson even resisted the temptation to include a direct print facility to work with its wide range of printers.
6MP sensor, but not full frame
What you do get is a 6 megapixel APS-C sensor. This means the cropping factor is 1.53x, so a 35mm system lens of focal length 50mm will capture the same field of view as a 76.5mm focal length lens. A guide on the back of the camera gives the user some equivalence examples.
Apart from the LCD viewscreen, there are no other digital displays on the camera. Analogue gauges and dials are provided to indicate or select shutter speeds, ISO, white balance, between colour and black and white mode, life left in the proprietary lithium ion rechargeable battery, etc.
The vertical travel multiple-leaf metal focal plane shutter offers speeds ranging from 1-1/2000th second, with a bulb mode and 1/125th second X-sync for electronic flash. There is no support for dedicated flash modes on the top-plate hot shoe. Manual and aperture-priority exposure modes, only, are provided and the metering sensitivity ranges from ISO200-1600.
The R-D1 has a Leica EM-compatible lens mount and can take L-series lenses using an adapter.
This article has been published in a bit of a rush, but it will be updated tomorrow (Friday) with more explanations concerning the design philosophy and target market, plus detailed product specifications. In the mean time, here is a set of shots taken today for your perusal:
The R-D1 is a large 'compact' camera by modern digital camera standards but will feel right to traditionalists
It's a fine looking camera but from this view there is nothing to suggest that it's a digital camera
Neither does this view from the rear give the digital game away
On the back of the reversible 2 inch LCD monitor is a convenient RD-1 to 35mm focal length conversions reckoner
The flip-out screen only does so in order for it to be reversed. It doesn't offer a live through the lens preview
This is as far as the screen goes - it's only meant to be used flush to the back of the camera
Only with the screen on show does the back of the camera actually look like a digital camera
This close-up shows the exquisite detail of the of the analogue gauges and that extraordinary lever
A top-plate switch selects the bright frame viewfinder between a field of few for 28, 35 and 50mm lenses and the 'rewind' knob is actually a jog dial control
Discuss the Epson R-D1 on the dpnow.com forum.
Technical Specifications
Epson R-D1 Rangefinder digital camera
|
Type | • Lens Interchangeable Rangefinder Digital Camera |
|
Sensor | • 23.7 x 15.6 mm APS-C size CCD
• Primary color filter (RGB)
• 6.1 million effective pixels |
|
Image sizes | • High (JPEG 3008 x 2000 pixels)
• Normal (JPEG 2240 x 1488 pixels)
|
|
File formats | • CCD-RAW (12-bit)
• JPEG (EXIF 2.21) |
|
Viewfinder | • Twice reverse Galileo finder
• 1.0 x magnification
• Radical line length 38.2 mm
• View frames 28 / 35 / 50 mm switchable
• Parallax correction
• 85% frame coverage
• Exposure display by LED |
|
Lens mount* | • EM mount
• Field of view crop: 1.53x
|
| Shutter speed | • 1 - 1/2000 sec
• Bulb
• 1/125 sec flash x-sync
|
| Exposure modes | • Aperture priority
• Manual
|
| Exposure compensation |
• +/- 2.0 EV
• 0.3 EV steps
|
| ISO sensitivity | • ISO 200
• ISO 400
• ISO 800
• ISO 1600
|
| White balance | • Auto
• Shade
• Cloudy
• Tungsten
• Fluorescent
• Sunny
|
| Image parameters | • Standard
• Epson Film 1
• Epson Film 2
• Epson Film 3
|
| B&W modes | • Standard B&W
• Green filter B&W
• Yellow filter B&W
• Orange filter B&W
• Red filter B&W
|
| LCD monitor | • 2.0" TFT LCD
• 235,000 pixels
|
| Needle display | • Image quality setting
• White balance
• Frames remaining
• Battery power
|
| Play mode | • Single image
• Four thumbnail view (2x2)
• Magnify (up to 9.4x)
• Highlight and Histogram display
• Exposure detail
|
| Print standards | • DPOF
• Epson Print Image Matching 2.6
• EXIF Print
|
| Self-timer | • N/A |
| Flash | • Hot-shoe
• X Synchro Contact
|
| Storage | • Secure Digital (SD)
|
| Power | • Epson EPALB1 Lithium-Ion rechargeable battery
• Battery charger included
|
| Dimensions | • 142 x 89 x 40 mm (5.6 x 3.5 x 1.6 in)
|
| Weight (no batt) | • 590 g (1.3 lb)
|
Note: Lenses with external dimensions exceeding 20.5mm cannot be used with this camera.
Project insight
How did the R-D1 idea start and where is it going?
Discuss the Epson R-D1 on the dpnow.com forum.
So why on earth did Epson decide to make such a strange camera as the R-D1? The motivation came from a couple of directions. First of all, a senior engineer within Epson proposed the project. The argument was that the concept of a rangefinder camera was being left behind by the rush digital. There is something rather special about using a rangefinder camera and the viewfinder of the R-D1, with its big, bright and natural view, underlines this.
Corporate statement
What is clear is that the R-D1 is being positioned as a limited edition statement of corporate kudos. Epson is saying – ‘look, we can do this’! Sure, 10,000 R-D1s at £2,000 each adds up to £20 million (nearly $40 million) but the R-D1 is not really a primary revenue centre for Epson. This kind of thing happens a lot in other industries, like the automotive world, for example.
Even though the R-D1 can hardly be called a product that is close to Epson’s core competencies in the digital printing world, the company has close links with camera maker, Cosina and the go-ahead was given for the two companies to develop the R-D1 as a camera that ‘epitomises photographic history’.
Faithful to traditional film camera concept
The R-D1 was deliberately designed to be as faithful as possible to the traditional concept of a film-based rangefinder camera, which is why the controls and gauges are all analogue and why there aren’t even basic digital camera features like a camera to PC connection.
Concessions to digital technology do exist – the large 2 inch 235,000 pixel colour LCD monitor is one but, just like digital SLRs, it’s not possible to use it as a live previewer. A nice touch is that when the screen is stowed face-in, you’d be hard-pressed to realise it was there in the first place. Unless the screen is actually displayed, the R-D1 hardly betrays it’s a digital camera at all.
For digital technophobes
Epson says the R-D1 design was also conceived to make the camera as comfortable as possible for existing, maybe technophobic, rangefinder camera users to handle. This even extends to retaining the film advance lever and though there is no film to advance any more, the lever does manually cock the vertical metal focal plane shutter. You can forget about continuous shooting on the R-D1!
Technical image quality compromise concerns?
But even so, the R-D1 is very much a digital camera and its use of Leica-fit lenses does raise some serious technical questions. The rear elements of many of these lenses lie relatively close to the focal plane. Undoubtedly, the relatively acute angles of incidence that image-forming rays meet the 6MP APS-C digital sensor at towards the corner of the frame will produce noticeable corner shading.
Although unconfirmed by Epson to date, it’s possible that corner-shading compensation may have been implemented for the R-D1. It’s not new – even some compact consumer cameras are now featuring it. The Olympus DSLR E-System manages the issue of corner shading elegantly because when you change the lens on your camera the lens mounted tells the body digitally how much compensation is required. But with the R-D1, this is not possible. I’d guess that the RAW processor plug-ins Epson will provide for Adobe Photoshop 7 and later, including Photoshop Elements 2.0 and later, would have some kind of manually variable corner-shading compensation built in, but I’m really only guessing. Epson did, however, say that the plug-ins would include a batch-processing mode and that the official file extension for R-D1 raw files is .ERF.
There is another question that currently remains un-answered. How quiet is the camera? One of the key assets of a Leica M-series camera, for example, is its quiet operation, especially compared to a mirror-thwacking SLR. The R-D1 shown to us was not working.
Who would buy such a beast?
So who is going to buy an R-D1? For £2,000 you don’t even get a lens – or even an SD card, so we are told! I don’t have any doubt that the R-D1 will sell-out and, indeed, it may even be sold out before it reaches any shops. The limited production run of 10,000 units, half of which will probably be swallowed up by the Japanese home market, should guarantee that. It’s likely that if Epson limit the production run to that 10,000 units, the R-D1 will become a collectors’ item – maybe all the concerns about corners shading and practicality will be secondary in the end!
If you are interested in the potential for Leica-fit digital rangefinder cameras, take a look at Andrew Nemeth’s interesting
FAQ.
Discuss the Epson R-D1 on the dpnow.com forum.
