Introduction

Ease of Use

The Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi has quite a distinctive look, especially if you go for the orange colour - such as the one we were supplied as a sample. The benefit of having a brightly coloured camera is that you should be able to see it more easily if you drop it while using it on your adventures - such as while on a snow covered mountain. It's quite a long camera, but it's slim enough to slip into a relatively loose trouser pocket, and it's also quite light too.

On the top of the camera there are two buttons, the on/off button, and the shutter release. These are situated quite close together, and although the power switch is smaller than the shutter release, it can be quite easy to accidentally confuse the two while you are using the camera with reduced visibility, i.e. underwater.

The rest of the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi's buttons can be found on the right hand side of the back of the camera. Grouping all the buttons together like this makes it easy to use the camera one-handed, which is particularly useful for a rugged camera.

Buttons which you'll find here are the zoom buttons (marked W - wide and T- telephoto), a playback button, a menu button, a video record button and a four way navigational pad. Each of the buttons on the navigational pad doubles up for another function - up accesses timer, right macro focusing, left flash options and the down button the shooting mode. In the middle of the pad is an OK button. The final button is a green button, which is used for different functions depending on the shooting mode you're in - in automatic mode, pressing it twice will activate the camera's Wi-Fi.

Front of the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi

The buttons are a little on the small side, which in normal circumstances is fine, but if you're wearing thick gloves, you may find it a little difficult to use the camera. On the plus side, they're nicely raised up from the body, so if you're using it underwater, it's easy to feel the ridges of the different button outlines.

Around the lens on the front of the camera, you'll see that the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi has a ring of LED lights. These have a couple of applications - they are primarily designed to be macro lights for assisting when photographing something very close up. The camera comes with a stand which you can place it on to allow you to photograph something flat very close up. They're also useful when you're shooting self-timer shots underwater, as the lights will flash in sequence to indicate the camera's shutter release is about to fire.

There is a dedicated button for video recording which is just underneath the four way navi-pad. Pressing this will activate the video recording, and the good thing about this button's position is that it's unlikely you'll accidentally press it and record video you don't want to.

Rear of the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi

Pressing the down key on the four way pad allows you to choose from the different shooting modes which the camera offers. Here you'll find a range of automatic and scene modes, including underwater mode, which is useful to activate when you are shooting in water. If you want to take a little more control over your shots, you may be disappointed to note there are no semi-automatic or manual modes, but you can choose to use a Program mode which gives you a little more control.

If you use Program mode, you can take control of certain settings, including white balance and metering. In order to make these changes, you'll need to go into the main menu, and scroll through the options which are presented. While this menu is fairly sensibly arranged, if you come out of the menu and go back in, you'll need to scroll to the setting you want to change again - a little frustrating if you want to change a particular setting fairly frequency.

There are two doors on the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi, one for the battery and memory card compartments, and the other where you plug in USB and HDMI cables. Both doors are protected from accidentally opening by lock switches which you must hold down before you can slide open the doors. These switches aren't quite as robust as something you might find on a more expensive model, but they do the job regardless.

Front of the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi

Although the WG-30 has Wi-Fi, it's not immediately obvious how you control the camera from your phone or tablet. After activating the Wi-Fi on the camera, you connect to the camera via your phone using the password which is displayed on the screen. Although Pentax has an app available to use with its DSLR cameras, that's not how you use it with the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi. Instead, you load up any web browser on your phone, and type in 192.168.1.1 in the address field. Then you'll be able to remotely control the camera or view and download images you've already taken with the camera.

Unlike with many Wi-Fi remote control applications, you can control quite a few different elements from your phone, including white balance, focus type, ISO, exposure compensation and so on. You can also zoom the lens in and out.

Autofocusing speeds are fairly quick when you're in good light, but when the light drops you may find the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi hunts a little more before it's able to acquire focus. Switching to macro focusing allows you to get incredibly close to a subject, but occasionally it can take a little time for the subject to snap into sharp focus.

Overall, the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi is a fairly easy camera to get to grips with, and as long as you don't want to take control of too many elements of it, you should find it easy to use.

Image Quality

All of the sample images in this review were taken using the 16 megapixel JPEG setting, which gives an average image size of around 5Mb.

When you're using the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi in good light, images appear bright and punchy, with a pleasing amount of good saturation and an overall goo impression of detail in each shot.

However, if you examine at 100%, it's possible to see some image smoothing even at the lower end of the sensitivity scale, such as ISO 125. That only gets worse as you move through the sensitivity range, and it starts to become particularly obvious at small printing or web sizes that there's a loss of detail from around ISO 1600, so it's worth avoiding the very highest settings of ISO 3200 and ISO 6400.

The Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi copes well with artificial lighting to produce fairly accurate colours, perhaps erring ever so slightly towards warm tones. If you're finding that to be a problem, you can switch to a more specific white balance setting when shooting in Program mode.

Similarly, automatic metering does a good job of producing accurate exposures in a variety of different conditions, so you should find that you don't need to dial in exposure compensation all that often.

Images taken at the far end of the telephoto optic (5x optical zoom) suffer from a little loss of detail when compared to those taken at the wide angle end of the lens, but it's not too bad when looking at images at normal printing and web sizes. Digital zoom is also usable, especially at small viewing sizes.

There aren't really any creative options to use with the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi, but you can shoot in Monochrome, Bright or Natural. Monochrome is quite a nice look, while you can use Bright if you want to boost saturation and contrast a little. It's worth remembering that as you can only shoot in JPEG you will be stuck with whatever colour way you choose to use.

Noise

There are 7 ISO settings available on the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi. Here are some 100% crops which show the noise levels for each ISO setting.

ISO 125 (100% Crop)	ISO 200 (100% Crop)
ISO 400 (100% Crop)	ISO 800 (100% Crop)
ISO 1600 (100% Crop)	ISO 3200 (100% Crop)
ISO 6400 (100% Crop)

Focal Range

The Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi's 4x zoom lens provides a focal length of 28-140mm in 35mm terms, as demonstrated below.

28mm	140mm

Sharpening

Here are two 100% crops which have been Saved as Web - Quality 50 in Photoshop. The right-hand image has had some sharpening applied in Photoshop. The out-of-the camera images are just a little soft at the default sharpening setting. You can change the in-camera sharpening level if you don't like the default look.

Original (100% Crop)	Sharpened (100% Crop)
Original (100% Crop)	Sharpened (100% Crop)

Chromatic Aberrations

The Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi handled chromatic aberrations excellently during the review, with very limited purple fringing present around the edges of objects in high-contrast situations, as shown in the examples below.

Chromatic Aberrations 1 (100% Crop)	Chromatic Aberrations 2 (100% Crop)

Macro

The Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi allows you to focus on a subject that is just 1cm away from the camera. The first image shows how close you can get to the subject (in this case a compact flash card). The second image is a 100% crop.

Macro	Macro (100% Crop)

Flash

The flash settings on the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi are Flash-on, Flash-off and Red-eye reduction. These shots of a white coloured wall were taken at a distance of 1.5m.

Flash Off - Wide Angle (25mm)	Flash On - Wide Angle (25mm)
Flash Off - Telephoto (100mm)	Flash On - Telephoto (100mm)

And here are some portrait shots. As you can see, both the Flash On or the Red-eye-Reduction settings caused a tiny amount of red-eye.

Flash On	Flash On (100% Crop)
Red-eye Reduction	Red-eye Reduction (100% Crop)

Sample Images

This is a selection of sample images from the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi camera, which were all taken using the 16 megapixel JPEG setting. The thumbnails below link to the full-sized versions, which have not been altered in any way.

Sample Movie & Video

Product Images

Front of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi

Front of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi

Front of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi

Rear of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi / Turned On

Rear of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi / Image Displayed

Rear of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi / Main Menu

Rear of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi / Shooting Mode Menu

Top of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi

Bottom of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi

Side of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi

Side of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi

Front of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi

Front of the Pentax WG-30 Wi-fi

Conclusion

If you're on a bit of a budget and are looking for a compact camera which is simple to use but has all the benefits of being rugged enough for your family holiday, then the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi is worthy of your consideration.

The best pictures it's capable of taking are when you're shooting in good light - which, if you're into skiing, visiting the beach, surfing and so on, you probably will be, so that's a good start. However, as a compact camera which you might want to use as an overall, or general, compact, image quality could be a lot better.

Taking photos in lower light reveals that there's quite a large amount of detail lost when you move up the sensitivity scale, so it's best to avoid using it in low light if you can.

It's good that there is inbuilt Wi-Fi, and while it's at first a little confusing knowing how to use it to its best ability, the fact that you don't need to install an app, and the amount of control which is afforded when using it remotely, make it better than many of the other Wi-Fi enabled cameras on the market.

Although those who are little more advanced may find a lack of a semi-automatic or manual modes on the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi might find it frustrating, that's not really the intended audience. If you want some more control, then it's worth taking a look at something which is slightly more expensive, such as the Ricoh WG-5, which has a few more options.

It's also shame that there's a lack of creative options on a camera of this kind. It would be nice to be able to experiment with digital filters, or to create panoramic images.

Overall, the Ricoh WG-30 Wi-fi is a fairly capable camera if you keep it to good light, and basic tasks. For the price though, it makes for a good holiday or family camera for those who like a little adventure.

Ratings (out of 5)
Design	4
Features	3
Ease-of-use	4
Image quality	3
Value for money	4

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