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The Ricoh GR IV earns constant recommendations as the everyday-carry camera, small enough to slip into a pocket, with an APS-C sensor packed into a body most compacts can't match. After roughly five months of real use, that pocket promise turned out to be the exact spot where things fell apart.
Rick Bebbington frames his time with the Ricoh GR IV not as a review but as a test against three personal criteria for keeping a camera. A camera has to capture the photos he wants consistently, it has to motivate him to pick it up, and it has to fill a real gap that nothing else in his bag already covers. He bought the camera with his own money, drawn in partly by his love for the Fujifilm X100 series, the camera he currently carries everywhere. The GR IV's size, its strong JPEGs, and its customizable image presets ticked several of those boxes on paper.
The reservations surfaced fast. The GR IV has no viewfinder, and Bebbington uses one for nearly every frame he shoots. A hot-shoe finder exists as an accessory, but the added cost would push the total near £1,600, and he wasn't willing to pay that. The fixed 28mm full frame equivalent focal length also fought his instincts. Almost every image he kept ended up cropped to 35mm or 40mm, which means he was throwing away pixels on basically every shot. The fixed, reflective screen made shooting at awkward angles frustrating, and there's no tilt mechanism to work around it.
Then came the problem that overshadowed everything else. The ring around the extending lens acts as a dust magnet, and when the lens retracts on power-off, it pulls that dust back inside the body. A spot appeared on the sensor after only about 1,200 photos, and the in-camera dust removal did nothing. Ricoh's own guidance is to avoid keeping the camera in a pocket, which strips away the single trait that made it appealing in the first place. The warranty doesn't cover it. Bebbington did eventually get the camera apart, cleaned, and reassembled, and the spot is gone, but a £1,400 camera shouldn't demand that so soon.
The three-criteria system is the part worth borrowing here, and it points to a wider shift in how people are buying gear. For years the conversation ran on megapixels, autofocus point counts, and open-gate video, specs that look decisive on a chart and mean almost nothing once a camera is in your hand. Bebbington's approach flips the order: start with how a camera fits your actual shooting habits, the ones you have now rather than the ones you imagine adopting. That last distinction is where most collections balloon. Buying for a future version of yourself, the street photographer or macro shooter you might become, is how film bodies and dust-collecting compacts pile up. If you're weighing any purchase, running it against "can it do the work, will I enjoy it, and does it cover a genuine gap" will save more money than any spec sheet. Ricoh has already announced a 40mm GR IIIx-style variant, which sits much closer to Bebbington's preferred focal length, a reminder that the right tool is often a small spec away from the wrong one.
The GR IV still does plenty well. The snap focus feature, where a programmed button jumps the lens to a preset distance, is fast and genuinely useful, and Bebbington wants to see it in more cameras. The one-handed ergonomics are excellent, the built-in ND is a nice touch, and the black-and-white JPEGs from the hard monotone setting pushed him to experiment more than usual. The raw files run a little crisp and clinical for his taste, the highlight rolloff doesn't match Fujifilm's, and the video mode is locked to program-only 1080p with weak autofocus. For anyone with a larger mirrorless setup who wants a high-quality camera to carry everywhere, though, it remains a strong option.
Watch the full breakdown above to see the dust issue up close, the sample images, and where Bebbington lands on whether the GR IV survives his three-question test.
English (US) ·