Ricoh Announces New 2.3 Megapixel RDC-5000

Ricoh Consumer Products Group announced the new RDC-5000 2.3 megapixel digital camera. Designed for consumer and business users, the new camera includes powerful features that enable a wide variety of applications such as 2.3x optical zoom, 1.6-inch super macro for close-up shots, continuous shooting capability, time lapse and USB connection. The camera also includes 8MB of on-board memory for storing images, and can be used concurrently with up to 32MB SmartMedia cards. The RDC-5000 will begin shipping in May at a to-be-announced competitive price.

The RDC-5000 offers three different JPEG compression ratios for each of the two resolution modes, 1792 x 1200-pixel or 896 x 600-pixel. The images are stored on a SmartMedia memory cards up to 32MB in size. The RDC-5000 has 8MB of internal RAM to speed up CCD image processing. When the camera is turned off, a sliding cover automatically extends to protect the 1.8-inch LCD monitor from accidental scratches.

When taking images in 1792 x 1200-pixel recording mode, you can choose to have the camera automatically apply a compression algorithm (similar to JPEG compression) to downsample the captured image to a 896 x 600-pixel format. Thanks to this advanced compression scheme, which selectively compresses less important image elements, the pictures that you take maintain sharp edges and high color contrast-detail that can be lost with normal compression techniques.