u/Quixotic-elixr

These are cars I get the most comments on

Scarab Watermelon • Scarab Bee • Scarab Pigeon • Octane Jew • Jäger 619 Alien • Fennec Interstellar

First thing to clarify: there are 6 ‘boxes’ to save recipes into but only 3 user dials. I see a lot of people unsure of how to have more than 3 recipes, or think that 6 is the maximum. I hope this post clears up some confusion.

Think of each box as a profile, where most settings adjusted and saved are unique to that profile. I have 2 recipe settings per box. You use the Recall function from the menu to load a recipe into the U1-3 on the dial. In the photo you’ll see which are loaded onto a dial and which are saved, awaiting recall.

Example: in box 3 I have Bennet’s 800 and Tri-X 400. Firstly, I create my recipes from an empty box (which should reset things to the global settings) while flicked to the user dial that the empty box will be assigned to ie U1.

Custom Image 1 🔧 has the image settings for Bennet’s 800 and Custom Image 2 has the image settings for Tri-X. Then in Custom WB1 and WB2, they are for Bennet and Tri-X, respectively. But we only have 2 custom image and 3 custom WB, so that lets us use a recipe that has two different WB such as Royal Supra or Nostalgic Negative. You can do this for all 6 boxes. Input the settings for IMG Custom 1 and Custom 2 with their respective WB in Custom WB1 and WB2. For recipes with two WB, I like to use the image settings in IMG2 and white balance compensation in WB2+3.

You should use the custom 🔧 option at the bottom of the list because it allows you to use the adjusted base film sim without affecting the Global film sim in P/M/Tv/Av - let’s use an example for Negative Film. If your dial is on any of these modes and you edit default Negative Film (pressing Fn on Negative instead of Custom1) it will change the base film sim across P/Tv/Av/M modes. So pressing Fn while it’s highlighting Negative Film is not what we want (yet), we need to press Fn while the selection is highlighting Custom1. This also means you won’t be applying a new recipe that overwrites a previous one because you applied it to global settings. I don’t like to overwrite the default WB because sometimes I still use it in my U1-3 recipes, eg Royal Supra’s WB-comp shade might ruin the look so I’ll use regular default shade.

But changing global image settings can be useful if we want to change the Posi/Neg/Retro/Monochrome/etc on every shooting mode. First, it means we can have a recipe such as Bennet’s 800 + Tri-X 400 in Custom1+2/WB1+2, but then adjust the default base option for Negative Film to set Reggie’s Negative, for example. And it gives you a use for WB3 (or in this instance, since Reggie’s Colour+Mono use the same WB, the WB3 gives you a WB for 2 recipes). But if you do this too much, you can lose track of where your extra settings are. And this is why we want to be using Custom1+2 where possible: because you can save it with a box name, and you don’t want to have applied Jakob’s Positive Film as your adjusted default sim but accidentally apply a different setting to overwrite that Positive Film. This way you can use your custom and keep Jakob’s Positive across all boxes and modes. This same concept applies to WB. If you always want your default AWB or default Daylight (etc) to have a tint, you can adjust that directly and not make a custom WB. It’s worth realising that this applies for every box - you can have unique default sim for every box, so for an unlikely but possible example: in 6 different boxes you could have 6 different adjusted settings to the base Vivid effect.

If you edited a default film simulation and want to restore it to Ricoh’s default settings, when pressing Fn on that IMG effect you will see little vertical bars along the horizontal line. These are the film sim’s original value.

What’s difficult about pairing some recipes is that you have global illumination settings (d-range, peripheral, etc) that apply to the entire box/profile, so it’s best to pair two recipes that share the same global illumination settings.

I turned my dial to P, applied Jakob’s Iglhaut’s Positive Film settings to the base Positive Film, and then made a Custom WB1. So every time I use Positive Film on P/M/Tv/Av mode it gives me the adjusted settings - and no need to save the recipe to a profile box, so it saves a box for. Once you’ve adjusted the global base IMG simulations, the camera saves it upon turn off. Then you can use any of the WB as normal, base settings, or use the WB Custom 1 which is the modified Cloudy.

So in reality I actually have 15 recipes on my device because my non-user modes default settings for Negative Film, Positive Film and Retro are using the adjusted versions for Ritchie’s Negative Film, Jakob’s Positive Film and Rustic Portra 400.

When you save your recipes the device will load whatever IMG and WB you saved it while it was on. So if you have loaded Bennet’s 800 (IMG Custom1) + Tri-X 400 (IMG Custom2) and primarily use Bennett’s, you want to make sure the IMG Custom1 and WB Custom1 are both active when you save settings so when you recall the recipe or switch to your U1-3 dial, it will load as Bennett’s and not as Tri-X or a mixture of both.

Happy to answer any questions (such as ”is 15 recipes overkill? Yes.”) and happy to learn anything new from people who know how to tinker with this camera!

If you’ve uploaded an image to your computer, laptop etc and some time later come back to it, love the look and colours but can’t remember your recipe/jpeg settings, here’s what you can do:

1. Load your SD card into your device that has the old photo

2. Move or copy the image from your device folder back into the Ricoh SD card’s folder where it stores all the images

3. Insert the SD card back into your camera

4. The image and its metadata will be on the camera. Go to the image preview and click Display until you reach the settings screen. It will show you the film sim/jpeg settings and other camera settings (exposure triangle, WB etc)

Can’t even tell it’s in my pocket!