Ricoh has confirmed to Amateur Photographer (AP) that the M-mount lens adapter for its GXR system camera will cost around £549 when it comes to stores at the end of this month.
The Ricoh GXR Mount A12 allows users to fit M-mount lenses, such as those from Leica, Voigtländer and Zeiss, in front of the adapter?s 12-million-pixel, APS-C sensor.
Frazer Allen, of distributor Alpha Digital Services, says the company expects to supply the adapter on its own for current Ricoh GXR owners, as well as in a kit form with the GXR camera and the VF-2 electronic viewfinder for £999.
On a visit to AP from their Yokohama office, product planning general manager Tomohiro Noguchi and marketing manager Mitsuyuki Kobayashi explained that the GXR Mount A12 uses a new micro lens array to counteract the sharp angles of incidence of light reaching the corners of the sensor.
?This new array is designed specifically with lenses wider than 21mm in mind,? explained Noguchi, ?as they have rear elements very close to the sensor. The redesigned micro lens pattern will help to direct light into the pixels and reduce the impact of the vignetting that would otherwise have occurred.?
Mr Noguchi then said that we would find it interesting to test the performance of wideangle lenses on the GXR and compare them to the results the same lenses achieve on other compact system cameras that can accept M-mount lenses via an adapter.
The company has designed the Mount A12 without a low-pass filter in order to maximise the detail resolution of the sensor. Anti-moiré firmware compensates for pattern interference in-camera, but only in JPEG mode.
There is still an optical infrared filter, which Ricoh claims to have made thinner than before. Mr Noguchi tells us that this new thin design is also to combat the impact of the narrow approach angles of light at the edges of the sensor. The thinness reduces the chances of dispersion as the light passes through the glass, and it maintains sharpness and chromatic accuracy ? particularly when wideangle lenses are in use.
When asked to explain the choice of two shutter methods, Mr Kobayashi told AP that the choice was included to allow users to decide for themselves whether a mechanical or an electronic shutter would be more appropriate in each situation.
Mechanical shutters are more accurate, he said, and produce better image quality, especially when photographing moving subjects. The electronic shutter mode on the new module, however, allows pictures to be taken in silence.
A test of a Mount A12 production sample will be published in AP?s 8 October issue.
