Ricoh announces rugged WG-6 and business-oriented G900 compacts; gets ready to ship long-awaited GR III

posted Thursday, February 21, 2019 at 6:00 PM EDT

With the CP+ tradeshow in Japan just around the corner, Ricoh has today made news on several fronts. Firstly, the company has revealed two closely-related new point-and-shoot models, one aimed at consumers and the other at industrial usage. Secondly, it has finally announced pricing and availability -- not to mention further specifications -- for its long, long-anticipated Ricoh GR III compact.

Since much of the GR III's feature set was already a known entity, we'll start off with the compacts. Here, the Ricoh G900 and WG-6 both share a newly-designed body that's still extremely rugged and now better-waterproofed than ever. They also sport a new, higher-res image sensor, 4K video capture and much more modern connectivity options.

Sadly, they've also dropped sensor shift image stabilization from the spec sheet, and switched back to the less-bright but further-reaching 5x zoom used by models before the WG-4 GPS. The G900 adds much more built-in memory, a bundled charger and business/industrial-oriented options like password protection, barcode scanning, onion-skin overlay of previous images on the live view, and even a firefighting scene mode.

For more detail on these models, read our Ricoh WG-6 preview or our Ricoh G900 preview.

And so we come to the APS-C sensor-shod Ricoh GR III. After an almost four-year wait, it's finally about to arrive in a matter of weeks, and we can now reveal -- drum roll, please! -- that list pricing will be set at US$900 or thereabouts when it ships next month. We also know new details about the lens, image sensor, image processor and plenty else besides.