Ricoh GR Digital

Every photograph in this section comes from one camera: the original Ricoh GR Digital, released in October 2005. Collectors and street photographers know it by several names, the GRD1, the GRD, the GR Digital I, or the GR Digital Classic. It was the first digital descendant of Ricoh's GR1 film compacts, and the beginning of the GR digital line that continues today. Of the three cameras on Lux Forma, this is the one that shoots only in black and white, and only ever will.

It is a pocketable magnesium body, under 200 grams, built around a fixed 28mm equivalent f/2.4 GR lens, six glass elements in five groups, sitting in front of an 8.1-megapixel 1/1.8-inch CCD sensor. There is no zoom. Snap focus, a fixed-distance trick borrowed from the film GR cameras, fires the shutter with no autofocus delay at all, which is why the camera became a street photography legend.

The CCD is the point. Sensors of this generation draw light differently than modern CMOS chips: highlights roll off harder, luminance grain sits in the shadows like film grain, and the GR Digital's in-camera black and white has been compared to Tri-X film since the day it shipped. In an era of computational smoothness, an early CCD digicam is one of the few digital instruments left with a signature.

The files posted here are unedited black and white JPEGs straight from the camera. No grading, no noise reduction, no crops. What the sensor saw is what you see, grain and all.

8.1MP 1/1.8″ CCD · 28mm equiv f/2.4 GR lens · ISO 64–1600 · snap focus · 170g · 2005