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.
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