Conclusion

You have to hand it to Ricoh for sticking its corporate balls to the wall and bringing a camera as radical as the Theta to market. With just a single click of a button, it enables you to instantly photograph a 360x360-degree spherical image to capture the world around you. It's a neat trick outdoors, but is best used inside where even a wide-angle or conventional fisheye lens just can't capture the feel of an interior space.

The accompanying smartphone app is equally easy to use and is the only way you can take more control over the camera. Its ability to let you stay out of sight of the Theta's vision is also invaluable if you don't fancy every shot you take to be heavily distorted selfie.

But if the Ricoh Theta m15 scores top marks for originality and ease of use, it's bottom of the class in most other areas. Image quality is seriously disappointing, as a recording resolution 6.42 megapixels is nowhere near enough to capture any degree of detail when the camera's field of view is this large. The same also goes for the Theta's video capability, but here detail is lower still as there's only Full HD resolution (2.07MP) to play with, whilst the 15fps frame rate is too slow to appear fluid.

It's also a pity that there's no memory card slot, though with each image consuming around 2.3MB and video clips limited to 5 minutes, the internal 4GB memory does go a long way. The inaccessible Li-ion battery is also another potential worry, rendering your Theta useless should it develop a problem.

And then there's the price. The Ricoh Theta m15 currently retails for around £200/$279, which is understandable given it's a niche product which is likely to have had relatively high research and development costs. However, splashing this much cash on a device with such limited functionality and poor image quality is hard to justify.

But the killer blow to the Theta m15 is the availability of smartphone apps like Google Camera which incorporates Google's Photo Sphere. This enables you to capture wraparound spherical panoramas using a normal smartphone camera, and though you'll have to spend much more time slowly panning your phone around you, this does at least mean you personally don't have to feature in every shot. What's more, each image will also be a far higher overall resolution with less lens distortion.

If you're after the easiest possible way to capture a wraparound spherical panorama, then the Ricoh Theta m15 is unbeatable. It's just a shame this ease of use is overshadowed by poor quality results and a price tag that's too high for what is very much a one-trick device. You can partly address the image quality issues by splashing even more cash on the Theta S model, as this records images equivalent to around 14MP, but even this is tough to recommend when a smartphone app can achieve similar results for free.

Ratings (out of 5)
Design	4
Features	2.5
Ease-of-use	4.5
Image quality	2
Value for money	3

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