My Ricoh GR IV, which I preordered right after the announcement, finally arrived. So far, so good. I had a little trouble with the new Ricoh World app, but it’s all working fine now. I haven’t had a chance to test out the camera enough yet to draw too many conclusions.
After the initial setup, the first thing I did was to test a GR III Recipe, and compare it to the GR IV. Technically speaking, the GR III/IIIx Recipes are fully compatible with the GR IV. The cameras share the same settings. The GR IV has two new effects: Cine Y and Cine G, which both look promising. It also has a Grain option for Positive Film, Negative Film, the two new Cinema effects, and all of the B&W options. Grain has three size and intensity options. Aside from that, the settings seem the same.
I noticed with my initial test, though, that the image rendering with identical settings did not produce identical results. My initial test was with the Americana Color Recipe from The Road Trip Collection, and the GR III and GR IV produced noticeably divergent results. Let’s take a look!
There are some obvious differences. First, the GR III has a little more of a greenish tint, while the GR IV has a little more reddish tint. This makes the GR IV images seem warmer. Not a massive difference, but a difference nonetheless, which is quite noticeable when comparing side-by-side. Most likely (and I’d have to play with this a little more) a small White Balance Compensation adjustment should get it closer. The other obvious difference is that the GR IV is slightly brighter. It seems like less than a third of a stop, and it might be that a High/Low Key adjustment will get the GR IV more inline with the GR III (again, this is something I’ll have to look into).
This is just one Recipe. I’ll have to do more tests to see what’s the same and what’s different, and what can be done to get them to be more similar, for all of the Recipes. I have a lot of work to do on all this, so it might take some time. My best advice for the moment is to use GR III Recipes on the GR IV, and just know that the results are a little different. If you want to add some Grain where applicable, by all means do so—personally, I like grain in my images.
RITCHIE'S RICOH RECIPES 
Hi Ritchie, it’s great that you got the GR IV! I think lots of people are looking for the GR II positive film recipe. The version that came with the GR III, IIIx and now IV isn’t as good.
LikeLike
They changed the rendering of Positive Film between GR II and GR III, and there’s not a way to get them to match. It’s not just colors, but tonality. Whether it’s “better” or “worse” is subjective, of course. Plenty of people say that it’s worse, but people will also say (for example) that Classic Chrome is worse on X-Trans IV compared to X-Trans II. My opinion (on both Positive Film and Classic Chrome) is that each iteration has its charm. With that said, I have tried a couple of times to more closely match the “new” Positive Film with the “old” one without success.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, it’s quite a challenging exercise. After my previous message, I did some searching and found this guy attempting to recreate it using his GRIII. He got quite close but didn’t quite match it perfectly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px3z3a_IH-w
LikeLike
I think his experiments and mine weren’t too far off each other.
LikeLiked by 1 person