GoKawiilI love black-and-white photography. I also adore compact cameras you can always have by your side. So I’m a total mark for the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, a fixed-lens camera that can’t zoom and can’t record color — at all. It’s a formula that makes the average person ask, “Why?”
I’ve tested the GR IV Monochrome for over a month, taking it with me everywhere and photographing everything. Let me explain how this pricey little point-and-shoot is likely to go down as one of my all-time-favorite cameras.
Ricoh GRs are some of the most unassuming, no-frills cameras around, and they have been since their conception in the film days. In the digital era, they’re pocket-size point-and-shoots with a large APS-C sensor permanently attached to a fixed focal length lens. If you’re familiar with Fujifilm’s popular X100 line, it’s like trimming one of those down to the bare minimum — that means no viewfinder and no fancy aperture ring. The X100 and other coveted street cameras like Leicas offer vintage-style shooting and double as lifestyle accessories or shoulder-carried jewelry (with prices to match). But a Ricoh GR is purely a shooter’s camera, with unabashedly modern methods of being used. Atop the camera is a typical mode dial, with customizable user presets, not an old-timey shutter speed dial.
The GR IV Monochrome takes last year’s Ricoh GR IV, strips out the color filter from the sensor, and replaces its built-in ND filter with a red filter (for one-click contrast adjustment purely using optics). Functionally, the alteration to the sensor gives the GR Monochrome an elevated ISO range of 160 to 409,600 and makes it better in low-light shooting (because color noise looks worse at high ISO than pure luminance grain). It maintains the upgrades established with the GR IV: improved autofocusing for its 28mm-equivalent f/2.8 lens, a 26-megapixel APS-C sensor, and 53GB of internal storage (supported by a microSD card slot).
Using the GR IV Monochrome feels just like the standard GR IV, with key functions that help it thrive in impromptu street-style shooting. It powers on and is ready to shoot in less than one second, and at any moment you can quickly full-press the shutter to forgo autofocusing and take a shot at a preset focus distance. Ricoh calls this Snap Focus, and it allows you to easily shoot from the hip with zone focusing — a staple of street photographers. The GR is all about spontaneity. Its autofocus system has face and eye detection, but it’s just a serviceable helper. The main way to use the GR is with single-point focusing and quickly moving it around the touchscreen. Many hardcore photographers will loathe its lack of an electronic viewfinder, but I’ve come to terms with its forgoing one for the sake of size.
But being forced into a black-and-white view of the world through this camera’s LCD is where the real magic happens. Any digital camera can be set to black-and-white mode, but not having the choice pushes you to look more intently at light and tonality. I pay extra attention to my compositions and seek out textures and tones I might ignore when shooting color. I know the camera can’t see color, so I mentally adjust my eye and my creativity to match — knowing there’s no bailout or reverting back to color in post. A more disciplined shooter may not feel they need all that, but I’ve shot enough on the GR IV Monochrome, other black-and-white-only cameras, and film cameras to know that I’m feasting when working with some limitations.
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