I admit not to visiting the site for a long long time.
Not much to report. I bought a camera body out of the first batch of GR cameras that were shipped to Australia. Love it to death for what it is but hardly use it any more. I still have a working copy of GRD, GX100, and GRDIV having given my GRDIII away to a son. I also have a "full system" of GXR cameras including several bodies. My blood stream runs "Ricoh Red".
Nevertheless the brand is hanging in there by its finger tips and although the product is good it is very "niche". I needed an updated GXR body with good evf and a shot to shot buffer that was professional capacity. A great product half-made and apparently abandoned at the Pentax asset acquisition. Unfortunately I gave up buying dslr bodies 10 years ago and my then rather nice collection of lenses was and is of the EF mount type.
Maybe three years ago there was a lot of talk about "needing" a GR camera made with different focal length fixed lenses. Apart from the nonsensical implication that all these lenses might collapse into the GR body shape there seemed little common ground for just what focal length might be suitable. I did not even bother to suggest my own personal preference for an 85mm FF field of view lens of any practical aperture maximum let alone a fast one. Nor were my protests that the modular GXR series was Ricoh's best effort in actually putting this requirement into practice. No - the issue was a demand for a number of GR "cameras" each with a fixed focal length on board. We all know how large the 50mm f2.5 macro module was for the GXR and how physically large and how long it took to get the A16 zoom on the market. It was and remains a very nice module - far better than I had expected.
In any case in the absence of anything new from Ricoh and in the face of the silly requirements for more variety in the GR camera lineup I did what I always do in these circumstances - go and fix it myself.
I bought a Panasonic GM1 to try it. It is a very capable little camera - tiny smaller even than the Gr - in fact it is almost exactly the same size as a Pentax Q but has a high resolution lcd screen and a half decent sized sensor inside. The GM1 was and is everything that the Pentax Q should have been on steroids. Also Ricoh missed the boat completely when they did not fit the GRDIV out as a 4/3 sensor camera with M4/3 mount.
The result was I bought more GM1 bodies then more GM5 bodies. By mixing and matching lenses I can make them into separate cameras as was loudly called out for the GR. But as the lenses are part of a widely supported system I can draw down from a huge range of available lenses. I could fit my favourite focal length by buying a Nocticron 42.5mm (85mm FF fov) f1.2 lens which is also image stabilised. The GM5 has an evf and a shot buffer that I have never had to wait for.
What more do I need?
Tom