Ricoh's Caplio R6 is billed as 'The world's thinnest digital camera with a 28mm wide-angle, 7.1x optical zoom lens'. So if a thinner camera with a 29mm wide-angle, 7.1x optical zoom lens came along, it presumably wouldn't beat the Ricoh. Pedantry aside, though, this is a neat little compact camera with a surprisingly large lens.
The Caplio R6 has a 7.24-megapixel sensor and a 69mm, high-brightness LCD - still not bright enough in full sunlight - which is the only means of framing shots. The lens offers 28-200mm, f3.3-5.2, so better at both ends of the focal range than most cameras at this price.
Controls are reasonably conventional, with a four-way button ring and four independent buttons on the back panel, and power and shutter release buttons on top, with a toggle ring around the shutter button to adjust zoom level. There's a 5x digital zoom as well as the optical magnification.
The only slightly unconventional control is a three-position slide switch, just above the LCD display, which is labelled My, Scene and Auto (a small green camera icon). 'My' enables you to shoot with your own settings, 'Scene' offers a range of 12 different shot modes, such as sports, landscape, nightscape and video, while 'Auto' should detect the right mode for itself.
In macro mode the Caplio R6 can focus down to just 10mm and in general the shots we took were well-balanced, though with some slight mauve tinges on blue skies in open landscapes. Portrait shots were lively and clean, partly due to CCD-shift vibration correction, which was first introduced in the R5 and is carried through here. This should give you an extra couple of exposure stops.
The Caplio R6 boasts face recognition, claimed to be able to spot a face in a shot and adjust focus, exposure and white balance for it. In our trials the little, blue frame-corners which appear on the display seemed as keen to zero in on the magnets on the front of a kitchen fridge as on the face that was centre-frame. We did manage to steer it in the right direction by moving closer to the subject, but this suggests Ricoh's face recognition still needs some work.
Ricoh provides a Lithium-ion battery with the camera, which it claims will last for 330 shots between charges, and there's 54MB of internal image memory which is noticeably more than many of its competitors. You're probably going to need to add an SD card if you mean to shoot at the camera's maximum resolution, but you'll get about 19 shots even without one.
