Ricoh GXR - catching up with the last two days

We already covered the official announcement and first previews of the GXR system, along with Ricoh's ofifical samples+brochure. Now it is time to fill-in the blanks!

The Future (maybe)
Akihabara News was at the Japanese launch and took plenty of pictures of various concept items that Ricoh was showing. These are not officially announced products, but they could become products. Or not. And by doing this, Ricoh officially opened the door for copy-machine jokes, since they showed "Ricopy" units :) Other "plug-ins" shown were GPS, projectors, and storage. Akihabara has them all in a gallery.

Another thing of practical interest is the "extension unit", where you can have the lens+sensor block a few feet away from the actual camera-body. Why rotate the LCD when you can move the lens to the right spot? :)

Hands On Reports
Carl at Alpha Mount World was one of the first to see this system in person and he is posting his early impressions on the system. Carl also has a pretty good name for the "lens units" (we called "lens blocks" before they had an official name) - he calls them "modules" which I think is the best name I've heard so far.

Long and detailed hands-on preview of the camera at Quesabesde including body comparisons to the GX200 and GR-fixed.

A detailed first look at this new system can be found at Photo Review.

Dpnow has pictures of the hardware, including a couple of side-by-side camera-body pictures between the GXR Macro and the Olympus E-P1 + zoom.

Bits and pieces of the system left and right at Trusted Reviews.

Hands-on Video Previews
Quesabesde has posted their standard hands-on video previews of both the macro module and the zoom module.

Kamera & Bild has a 9-minute video of the camera being handled and shown.

The Imaging Insider spotlights another hands-on video preview of the camera.

Sample Pictures
Foto Actualidad has spotted plenty of sample pictures from the APS-C macro lens-block at Chinese website DC Fever. Click on each picture twice (from the thumbnail) to see the full-size JPEG.

Opinions
The Ricoh GR Diary discusses the new announcement and talks about how this system fits (so far) in the grand scheme of things.

Based on what we know so far, Radiant Life has posted their thoughts on the pros and cons of the system.

Marco takes a break from his blogging break to opine on the new system, and he closes by revealing what he plans to do.

Photo Club Alpha opines on this new release as well and reminds us all of the old Minolta EX1500, which of course now has been Borg'ed into the Sony legacy :)

Also, Enticing the Light takes a look at what we have seen so far.

Ricoh GXR microsite
Ricoh has created a nice new microsite (re-sizes web-browser window) for the GXR system, featuring place-holders for galleries from photographers Taichi Kozawa, Terauchi Masato and Herbie Yamaguchi. They do have web-size pictures from Robert Adachi (website) along with two short pages of essay+impressions (click on the "Impressions" link on the bottom-right corner of the pictures, after you enter his gallery).

This is a Flash-based website so be sure you have available bandwidth and computer-resources!

More Announcement Coverage
We only covered the first wave of announcement-coverage, so if you want to skim through the remaining websites we haven't mentioned yet to see if anyone has any gems no one else has noticed yet, here we go...

+ Let's Go Digital
+ Imaging Resource
+ AP UK
+ CNet UK
+ ALC
+ PDN Gear Guide
+ DC Resource
+ Photoxels
+ Fotopolis
+ Buy n Shoot