Metering for the highlights
There’s something about the GRiiix that really lends itself to night photography. I have, for the past (many) years shot in full manual but the GRiiix seems to get so many things right with the exposure that I can at least leave ISO on auto and use highlight weighted metering. Contrasty street shots at night using highlight weighted metering make me realise I’ve probably been overexposing night shots in the past. Sure, you can of course get your exposure correct/weighted for highlights in any camera but there’s just something about the way the GRiiix handles these scenes that makes shooting with the camera so easy.
DxO PureRaw
Using auto ISO I set the upper limit to 6400. At this level you will start to see a fair amount of noise but running the DNG files through DxO PureRaw yields incredible results. If you do invest in one of these cameras I would strongly recommend considering DxO PureRaw – I can shoot with (almost) the same level of confidence I could with full frame cameras in low light situations as I know I can clean it up later to a pretty much noise-free image.
Whether you care about a little noise in your photos is another matter and if you’re only looking to post photos on social media you probably don’t need that level of noise reduction. At the time of writing the AI noise reduction in Lightroom doesn’t seem to work in terms of luminance noise. It does an OK job on colour noise at lower ISO shots but seems to do nothing in terms of luminance noise. Higher ISO shots effectively look the same after running through Denoise AI. For now DxO PureRaw is an excellent first step in the process workflow as it cleans up noise, applies camera/lens correction and sharpens effectively (although you really don’t need to sharpen the GRiiix images much as the lens is insanely sharp).
Focus
The low-light focusing ability of the GRiix isn’t brilliant. It’s not terrible but it will miss a few shots and hunt a fair amount. However – if you accept you’re going to throw away a few shots it is still very usable.
I haven’t yet really mastered snap focus on the Ricoh – I don’t imagine it’s too difficult to get used to and I think once you really learn to use it, the low-light auto-focusing inadequacies might, for many cases, be a non-issue. Either way – I wouldn’t let reports of the low-light focusing put you off this camera as there are plenty of ways to work with it.