Bound by a natural link, the popularity of digital photography has shadowed the Web's ever since mainstream consumers began to recognise the power of the Internet as a social and business communication tool. The manner in which Ricoh is seeking to exploit and strengthen that link with its RDC-i500 digital camera is so obvious, its odd that it hasn't been done before. The RDC-i500 lets you email your images or upload them to the Web directly from the camera, eliminating the need to transfer them to a PC or laptop first. If only the camera shipped as a network-capable package...

How does it work?

The RDC-i500 doesn't have any in-built communication hardware; it depends on third-party devices for network connectivity. Differentiating itself from other digital cameras, the RDC-i500's CompactFlash slot supports a CF communication card and sophisticated TCP/IP network connectivity tools have been integrated into the camera's user-interface to exploit the add-in. In this sense it would be more accurate to say that the RDC-i500 is Internet-ready than Internet-enabled, but it's still the camera's most dominant advantage over competing products.

Connect a digital camera to the Internet via a dial-up connection, or an intermediate network that has access to it, brings its own unique set of problems. The most obvious challenge is making a small device with limited input capabilities amenable to sophisticated dial-in and network set-ups.

Ricoh has taken an interesting approach to the problem. When the camera is connected to a PC via a USB or LAN connection it behaves like a network location. It has its own IP address and Web interface, allowing the camera's communications settings, address book and project management features to be configured from the desktop using Ricoh's purpose-built browser software (the default IP address for the RDC-i500 is 127.0.0.1 but Ricoh assures us that it can be set manually).

The camera's image management features let you plan the manner in which the camera distributes pictures across the Internet. For example, you can create shot-lists, predefine titles for each image in the set and give them text tags to streamline the process of emailing them from a remote location. Alternatively, you can upload your images directly to a Web site, nested in an HTML template generated by the camera.

It's possible to use the camera's onboard navigational controls to configure the camera, but the process of entering text is still too awkward and time-consuming for extensive configuration tasks and regular use in the field. From this point of view, the desktop interface is a necessity rather than a convenience, and Ricoh can't quite claim to have removed the 'middle-man' (the PC) completely.

The pointy end

Targeted at publishers, Web-professionals and small-businesses that need to retrieve and post images from remote locations quickly Ricoh hasn't given itself any excuse to ignore the RDC-i500's core purpose. It contains a 3.34 megapixel CCD that can generate 2048 by 1536-pixel images, a 35mm-105mm 3x optical zoom lens and all the colour, lighting and image control features you would hope to find in a mid to high-end digital camera. At 40-50 minutes, it's battery life is a shorter than a professional might consider ideal for a device that's designed to free them from the office but, if used judiciously, its adequate for the most semi-professional applications its likely to be recruited for.

A few nice professional touches compliment the specs such as the ability to attach WAV memos to images and the ability to swivel its LCD screen through 270 degrees, but there is one oversight in the camera's design that may limit the attraction of its Internet connectivity features. The camera only has 8M of memory onboard and offers there is no hope of expanding that whilst the camera's flash slot is occupied by a communication card. This isn't really enough to meet the requirements of publishers and journalists who need to send hi-res images back to base and doing so will involve a lengthy process of swapping cards and moving files on and off the camera's internal memory. Ricoh, having made the choice to include JPEG compression facility in the camera, don't seem to take the prospect of moving hi-res images very seriously. But this isn't a limitation of the camera--it's a bandwidth limitation imposed by the realities of POTS modem communications.

If you intend to use the RDC-i500's network facilities memory expansion immediately ceases to be a problem. The camera's CF slots can be used to expand the camera's memory up to 1G using the IBM Microdrive. If that's out of your price range Pretec has recently released a 640M version of its CF memory card in the US and it's rumoured to making its way to Australia in the next few months.

Value for money

At $AU1,999 (RRP) the RDC-i500 will cost you approximately $AU800-$AU600 more than a conventional 3.34 CCD digital camera. Unfortunately you will have to dip your hand in your pocket again to utilise the camera's online capabilities. The CF communication card required to network the RDC-i500 is an optional addition. Ricoh recommends the Pretec 56K CompactModem ($AU299) or the Xircom CompactCard Modem 56 GlobalACCESS (AU$349-399). For LAN connectivity a Pretec CompactFlash 10BaseT LAN card will cost around ($AU286). The RDC-i500's online capabilities offer minimal if any total cost of ownership advantages unless you intend to use the camera for overseas assignments; it comes down to a calculation of cost versus convenience and that's nigh-impossible to calculate across the entire spectrum of the camera's potential market. We'll leave that up to you.

Ricoch RDC-i500
Company: Ricoh
Price: AU$1,999
Distributor: Ricoh Australia
Phone: 13 14 76

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