Originally posted by MMVIII I agree! The lack of raw and some weird constraints in usability make it not worth for my documentation purposes. You can, for instance, not use shutter priority and interval timer at the same time. Or something like that (doesn't matter, guess you got my point. I tried to use it in kite aerial photography, which is useless, because I can not set a short shutter speed, I can not fix the white balance and the intervalometer sucks.
Why can't a rugged camera have the same user interface as a GR, or even a Q? Yes, less buttons and wheels, I get it, but even if it would be far from convenient, just give me a full manual mode and RAW and the camera is so much more useful.
My first digital camera was the
Leica Digilux 1. The best thing about the Digilux 1 was how quickly you could obtain proper exposure in any situation using manual mode.
This is how they describe it on wikipedia: Manual Exposure: Full manual exposure is possible using the jog buttons. The display mimics the exposure changes rather than brightening up as the scene moves into darker areas, so that it is possible to see what the manual adjustments are doing to the image.
I wish they would allow the GR to have a Manual Mode setting as described were Aperture and Shutter are controlled by the 4 way button pad instead of the lever and scroll wheel. The screen mimics the exposure changes etc. The Digilux 1 was a pleasure to use through this straight forward simplicity in controlling the camera.
This rugged camera segment is odd. Canon Panasonic Fuji Ricoh Nikon all have a similar camera that excludes RAW support. They are all priced relatively the same. Only Olympus does the
TG-5 with RAW support. At roughly twice the price. I think the lens is rather mediocre.
I have said in the past repeatedly that Ricoh/Pentax should have the GR and a companion Pentax APS-C rugged WP compact with a 28mm lens for a (42mm 35mm eq.).
---------- Post added 02-20-19 at 05:45 PM ----------
Originally posted by reh321 Maybe the regular users of these cameras don't want to camp in front of a computer 'developing' raw files to get JPEG; maybe SOOC JPEG meets their needs.
Those users will always have the option to not shoot in RAW file format. They can always just shoot in SOOC JPEG file format. So they are not going to be forced to have to use RAW files.