Ricoh's Caplio RR10 has an unusual vertical/horizontal design. About the size and shape of a hand-held dictation machine, you slide it down on one of its ends into a supplied dock, which you keep connected permanently to your PC. The dock, known as the Ricoh Base, acts as a recharger for the built-in Lithium-ion battery, a link for downloading pictures and the same for uploading music files.
Music files? Yes, this is another multi-function camera, designed for people who want to listen to music on the move. However, a late-night bus or train is probably not the ideal place to brandish a £300 piece of technology and anyway, the 8MB Secure Digital memory card will only hold a couple of music tracks.
Used as a camera, the Caplio RR10 is well-designed, although a little limited in function. A large thumbwheel on its back panel selects function - including music playback, audio recording and a short sequence of video - and most other controls are operated from 4 buttons above and below the LCD display and a thumb-pad for controlling the zoom level.
There are a few shortcomings to the Caplio RR10's feature list. There's no optical viewfinder for a start; you have to use the LCD display for every shot, which won't be to everyone's taste. There's no tripod mount and no macro facility, either, though in its normal mode the camera focuses down to a very useful 40mm.
Image quality was fair, though the lack of a macro mode was obvious on the close-up flower picture. The landscape shot was better, with reasonably natural colours and decent clouds. Overall, the Caplio RR10 is a better attempt at a camera with multimedia pretensions than the FujiFilm FinePix 30i.
