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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ray Sachs" data-source="post: 154878" data-attributes="member: 365">Responses to a few of your questions:3. TaV mode basically does what it's supposed to do, but it can act quirky at times, with some rather large and inexplicable jumps in ISO. There are tricks you can play with some of the DR settings to impose something of a governor on the high end, but I always found that a little unpredictable. With the older Ricohs (pre-TaV mode), you could use auto-ISO in manual mode but you could also place a top limit on the ISO - TaV isn't really set up to do that without some pretty complicated work-arounds. I know at least two people who no longer have GR's due to frustration with TaV mode. I ended up buying a different camera instead partly because of this..4. Snap focus, as you've ascertained, is nothing but a shortcut to zone focus. It can't do magic, but it implements zone focus as well as anything else, and more quickly and conveniently than almost anything else. So, if it's missing, you're not setting it up right. Try this in decent light - set your aperture to f6.3 and set snap focus to 2 meters. Unless you're trying to shoot someone who's closer than about a meter of you, the whole rest of the world will be in focus. If you ARE trying to shoot stuff inside of one meter, drop snap focus to 1 or 1.5 and go even tighter with the aperture. But for street shooting in good light, I use f6.3 and 2 meters all day without any problems. I have a Nikon A and I use zone focus with these settings and they're the same focal length and sensor - it just works. When the light gets lower, you probably have to open up your aperture some. I've gone as wide as f3.5, still at 2 meters, at which point your zone of focus is down to about 4 feet out to about 10 feet - not all that wide, but still great for most low light street work...5. In Av mode, you can use auto-ISO and designate a minimum shutter speed. It only allows you to select up to 1/250 - not fast enough for my taste, but many are happy enough with it. I think you need to set ISO to auto-high, but I forget the exact terminology or where you find it in the menus - its pretty far removed from the other ISO menus if I recall. The way it works is you set your aperture and auto ISO (with whatever maximum ISO you're comfortable with - I use 6400 on the GR, much less on earlier models) and the ISO will keep climbing as needed to maintain your designated minimum shutter speed. Only after it pegs out at the highest ISO you've allowed for and still needs more light will it start to lower the shutter speed below your minimum. I love this logic and find it entirely workable, but I'm just not satisfied with 1/250 as a top minimum shutter speed. The Nikon A uses 1/1000, the Fuji XE2 will be using 1/500, and the Samsung NX300 I think may go as high as 1/2000 or more. All using the same logic. This is primarily why I chose the Nikon A over the Ricoh - 1/500 is about the lowest that I'd find useful. The Olympus m43 models allow a back door method of setting this as high as 1/320 and that's still no high enough for me. So with the GR and Olympus I end up just monitoring the shutter speed and set the ISO manually to make sure the shutter speed is usable. It's very easy to set ISO on the fly with the GR, so if none of the auto ISO modes work for you, at least the controls for setting ISO manually are excellent - best I've ever used actually. YMMV of course, but either TaV mode (with it's own set of issues) or Av using a auto-high ISO and a minimum shutter speed of your choosing is the way to keep the shutter speed up as light changes without having to manage it manually (and actually TaV results in you managing it manually - you just monitor ISO and change shutter speed rather than monitoring shutter speed and changing ISO - six of one, half dozen of the other)...7. P-mode being biased toward f4 for almost everything was a big point of discussion when the camera first came out. I THINK Ricoh addressed this in their firmware update, but I'm not sure. Do you have the latest firmware? If not, probably worth installing. It fixed one thing that I thought was pretty critical and was one of the reasons I didn't initially choose the GR - you can now set it so the exposure comp "menu" doesn't stay live after you adjust exposure comp - it'll go away as soon as you half press on the shutter. That thing staying open and live until pressing the OK button was a real problem with the initial FW, IMHO - good on them for fixing that and re-installing an option that had been on their earlier models. Odd that they left it out in the first place...8. I love snap-focus with the Ricohs I've owned and I've NEVER liked press through snap. I'd either press too softly, in which case it would auto-focus rather than pressing through to snap. Or, to avoid that, I'd press very aggressively to make sure it pressed all the way through and then I'd end up with camera shake way too often. Some people swear by it - I never found the touch for it. I'd just assign AF/Snap toggle to the fn1 button and then I could switch between snap and AF instantly and not worry about how hard I was pressing the shutter button.9.  AF is slow as molasses in low light. Just a fact of life. Not unique to the GR, but the contrast between the relatively fast AF in good light and the very slow AF in low light is wider than most other cameras I've used...Good luck - it's a great camera, but it's got its quirks and it requires a lot of user understanding...-Ray</blockquote>

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