What a thread! Ray, you've done a great service to many, I'm sure, with your drawn out user comparison.
I've recently considered getting of these two cameras and I'm leaning ever so slightly Nikon for the color output, the manual focus adjusted by ring around the lens, and the 'I' menu super control panel feature. I also like quick access to auto exposure bracketing, which I think the Nikon offers.
But I've never held either in person.
One question, a significant one for me, does the Nikon offer Auto ISO adjustment when aperture and shutter are manually selected? That feature (or lack thereof) may well make the decision for me. I'm really hoping Nikon has it!
For my preference, these cameras would be even better with 32-35mm equivalent focal length lenses, but 28 isn't much to complain about. Ricoh understands this with the 35crop feature. Perhaps some day one of these iterations can be had with a 32 to 35mm equiv.
Hi, is that you Don? If so, good to see you over here. If not, welcome to whoever the new DHart is....
The short answer to your one question is YES, you can use auto ISO with manual aperture and shutter speed - in M mode on your mode dial. You can on the GR too - it has a special mode for it called TaV. But that's just part of the story.
The Ricoh's TaV mode automatically puts you into manual mode with auto ISO turned on. It also ignores/invalidates any of your auto-ISO settings that would have worked in other modes, such as maximum ISO or minimum shutter speed. Which makes a certain amount of sense because the ISO is the only free floating variable available to compensate for any strange combinations of aperture and shutter speed we might choose, so it'll just go straight up to the camera's max of ISO 25600 if it has to to avoid under-exposure. When it runs out of ISO, it just runs out of ISO and you underexpose - there's no automatic reduction in shutter speed or something to compensate. Also, it was designed to allow exposure compensation to still work as it would in any other mode, so you can dial in positive or negative exposure in this mode. This mode works exactly as designed. I personally would have liked some sort of imposable governor on it that wouldn't let it go beyond some high setting and if it hit that, it would start ramping down shutter speed to maintain a usable exposure, but it doesn't. I was relying on this mode for my sunny weather street shooting, with an aperture of f6.3 and shutter speed of 1/500. This was working well, with enough light to keep the camera down in the 100-400 range in the sun, but I turned the camera into a heavily shaded outdoor area for a few shots and was very surprised to see ISO values on those shots of up to 9000. My bad - the camera was just doing what it was supposed to do, but I'd have loved a user designated high setting with some sort of shutter speed adjustment to prevent situations like that. I could have lived with 1/350 or 1/400 for a few shots it if would have stopped the ISO at 6400.
The Nikon is different. Arguably, its equivalent of TaV mode is less well thought out (or even intentional), but the good news is the auto-ISO is configurable to an extent that its made this mode completely un-necessary for me. This is actually one of the primary factors that has tipped me over to decide to buy the Nikon rather than the Ricoh. First the strange part about how this mode works. The mode dial is set to M so you're in manual mode as you would be without auto-ISO. If auto ISO is turned on, it's working in M mode and it will adjust exposure. BUT, if you have a maximum ISO set in your auto-ISO settings, it will stop at that point. If your set-limit is 6400, it will go no higher than 6400. It won't compensate for needing more exposure by ramping back the shutter speed or aperture when you hit that max, though - the screen just starts going darker as you're underexposing the shot. So, there's nothing automatic other than ISO but your ISO limits will be respected, regardless of consequence. There's also a minimum shutter speed setting in the auto-ISO settings that that's totally over-ridden in manual mode by the shutter speed you select yourself, as it should be. The one part of this mode that I think was "unintentional" on the Nikon is the ability to use exposure compensation. The camera has a default exposure compensation button on the upper left side of the back. Its a dedicated exposure comp button and it can't be programmed to do anything else. It works by holding the button down and turning the adjustment dial to raise or lower exposure comp. But in manual mode, it merely switches the variable (aperture or shutter speed) that the main dial was set up to control. If its set to control aperture and you hold down the exposure comp button and turn the dial, it will adjust shutter speed instead. And vice versa. It does not dial in any exposure compensation. So one is to believe Nikon does not want you to be able to adjust exposure compensation in manual mode, which would put it at a distinct dis-advantage to the Ricoh in my mind.
BUT, here's where it gets interesting and a little strange. I don't like the location of the exposure comp button because that's a variable I work with a lot while I'm street shooting and moving in and out of shadows, shooting toward and away from the sun, etc. So I like one-handed operation of this key adjustment and with the default exposure comp button, it requires two hands. But the camera has an fn1 button on the front of the camera, to the right of the lens, that can easily be worked with your right ring finger or pinky. So I also assigned exposure compensation to that fn button so I can just hold that button down briefly with my ring finger while I turn the dial with my thumb and now exposure compensation is an instant, one-handed operation. But the weird part is that in M mode with auto-ISO turned on, THIS button still controls exposure compensation. Where the designated/default exposure compensation button does not do this (it merely changes which other variable the dial controls), this secondary programmable exposure compensation button allows you to dial in exposure compensation, effectively creating a TaV mode equivalent in this camera. This is a really good thing and something I thought was key to liking the camera at first.
But what I've also discovered is that I use the TaV mode on the Ricoh because I have to in order to get the shutter speed and aperture combinations I need for street shooting in bright light. This is because the highest minimum shutter speed you can set in the auto-ISO controls on the Ricoh is 1/250 of a second. When I'm street shooting, I mostly would rather have a higher shutter speed and would rather the camera allow for say 1/500 at ISO 400 rather than forcing the ISO all the way down to 200 before it would raise the shutter speed from the minimum of 1/250. So using auto-ISO in aperture priority mode does not work for me in bright light on the Ricoh because of this relatively low minimum shutter speed. So I have a couple of custom settings for street shooting, one for bright light, one for low light, and they use totally different modes and different logic. In low light I set it up in aperture priority with a max ISO of 6400 and the minimum shutter speed of 1/250. And when it hits 6400, it starts dropping the shutter speed below 1/250 as it needs to in order to maintain a reasonable exposure. This works in low light because you're never going to be able to use a shutter speed much above 1/250 anyway, so I let the camera do the thinking for me here. But in bright light, I want a higher shutter speed and there's plenty of light to allow that, so I have to set it manually and just keep an eye on where the ISO is going and manually adjust the shutter speed so the ISO doesn't go too high in low light or need something lower than the base ISO in bright light. This is basically just a mirror version of what I used to do with my GRD3 which didn't have the ISO latitude that this camera does, but instead of constantly monitoring where the camera was setting ISO and adjusting shutter speed accordingly, I'd have it in aperture priority and manually control the ISO to make sure I was getting the best tradeoffs between aperture and shutter speed. So shutter speed would float but I'd keep an eye on it and keep it in check by adjusting ISO. Ricoh makes this incredibly easy by allowing you to set up the ADJ lever to directly control ISO with a right or left flick of the lever - no button pushing to arm the adjustment - its always live. I'd actually rather monitor shutter speed and adjust ISO to keep it in a reasonable range than monitor ISO and adjust shutter speed to keep ISO in a reasonable range. But its really six of one, half a dozen of the other - either way you're flicking the AJD lever to the right or left to immediately control either shutter speed or ISO to keep the other variable in a range that makes sense to you.
Where the Nikon makes all of this monitoring and adjusting un-necessary for the way I shoot because of one simple difference - its auto-ISO setup allows you to set a minimum shutter speed of up to 1/1000 of a second, rather than the 1/250 on the Ricoh. With this setup, I can set auto ISO with a maximum of 6400 and a minimum shutter speed of 1/500 and the camera will do the rest of the thinking for me. If its bright enough to maintain 1/500 at my chosen aperture below 6400, it'll be well below 6400 most of the time in decent light outdoors. If the light gets low enough that it can't maintain a shutter speed of 1/500j even at 6400, it'll keep the ISO at 6400 (which I pretty much always find acceptable for street shooting with these cameras) and drop the shutter speed as needed. It employs the same logic I would if I was using manual mode with auto-ISO and just keeping an eye on ISO and adjusting shutter speed to make sure the ISO didn't go too high or low. It just saves me having to think about it. With this simple difference in the auto-ISO settings, the Nikon allows me to have two different custom setups in the two custom slots on the mode dial. In both I'm in aperture priority. On one of them set for street shooting, I just have the max ISO set for 6400 and the maximum shutter speed for 1/500 as described above, which works perfectly for my street work in good light or low light. My other custom setting is for more sedentary shooting where maintaining enough DOF and fast enough shutter speeds for street shooting is NOT the priority and I'll set a max ISO of 3200 and a minimum shutter speed of something like 1/60 or 1/80. And I'll manually adjust the aperture depending on whether I want more depth of field or less. But with a max ISO of 3200, this mode places more emphasis on image quality (because either of these cameras, like most modern sensor cameras, is really very very good up to 3200) than on stopping action and maintaining deep DOF. And then if I want to do something like slip into shutter priority mode to do some panning with a lower shutter speed, I just slip out of the two custom modes and set it up manually. But these two custom modes really account for the vast, overwhelming majority of my shooting.
So, the short answer is, YEAH, the Nikon allows auto ISO in manual mode and even allows use of the exposure compensation control IF you program the fn1 button to control exposure compensation. So it has the equivalent of the Ricoh TaV mode available if you want it. BUT, with a minimum shutter speed that can be set as high as 1/1000 in auto ISO, you might never NEED to use this manual mode with auto ISO. Obviously your shooting and your reason for wanting this particular mode might be completely different than mine and all of this discussion has been un-necessary for you. But it actually played a huge role in which camera I ended up choosing because of its functionality for the way I generally shoot. So I figured it was worth laying out there in case its relevant to anyone other than me...
-Ray