Ricoh KR-10M (1990)

My sister-in-law gave me this Ricoh KR-10M camera that once belonged to her late father. Unfortunately the camera had been dropped on its nose at some point and the Vivitar 70-210 mm zoom lens that was on it was broken. The camera apparently survived the fall otherwise intact, so I replaced the broken Vivitar with a Ricoh f/2 50 mm lens from eBay.

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The KR-10M has a plastic body with a metal lens mount. It takes four AA batteries and has motorized film advance and rewind. The lens mount is a Pentax K-mount bayonet. Pentax licensed the K-mount to numerous manufacturers, making a wide variety of K-mount lenses readily available. Pentax screw mount lenses also work with an adapter. There are control buttons (shutter release, self-timer, mode, up and down setting selections) and an LCD status display (battery indicator, shutter speed, exposure counter, film advance indicator, film loaded indicator, multiple exposure mode indicator, continuous photography mode indicator) on the top.  The back of the camera has a film ID window, the film rewind button, and a socket for the shutter remote.  The front has the release button for the lens, the auto exposure lock button and the flashing LED for the self timer.  The bottom has a tripod socket.

The camera has through-the-lens metering with either manual exposure or aperture priority auto exposure. It also has auto-bracketing auto exposure to allow you to take three pictures, one at the metered exposure, one with 1/2-stop more exposure, and one with 1/2-stop less exposure. Film speed is automatically set by the DX code on the film cassette. The film speed defaults to ISO 100 for a non-DX coded cassette. An exposure compensation setting allows you to manually change the rated film speed by +/- 4 stops.  With a non-DX coded cassette you can set the film speed from ISO 6 (increase exposure 4 stops from ISO 100) to 1600 (decrease exposure 4 stops from ISO 100).  The camera will read the number of exposures on a DX coded cassette and automatically rewind the film once the rated number of exposures have been made.  On a non-DX coded cassette the camera just stops when it reaches the end of a roll.  You have to rewind the film manually by using a pen to press the recessed film rewind button.  You also can rewind any film in the middle of a roll.  The camera leaves the tip of the film leader sticking out, which is handy when you reload the film later to finish the roll.

The shutter is vertically running and electronically timed. The shutter speed in auto exposure mode varies from 1/2000 second to 32 seconds. In manual mode you can set the shutter speed from 1/2000 to 16 seconds.  Flash sync speed is 1/60 second set manually with a non-dedicated flash unit or 1/100 second set automatically with a Ricoh dedicated flash unit.  The frame rate is three pictures per second with the camera set for continuous photography.

The viewfinder has a diagonal split-image focusing aid and displays the shutter speed at the bottom of the viewfinder.  

The original list price for the camera and an f/2 50mm lens was $376 in 1990.  In 1992 Popular Photography reported that the street price was about $200. The KR-10M was considered an entry level SLR.

Ricoh began in 1937 as  Riken Kogaku Kogyo K.K. (Riken Optical Industries Co., Ltd.)  It was a spin-off from Riken (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research). Riken Optical Industries changed its name to Ricoh in 1963.  Ricoh acquired Pentax in 2011, and still makes digital cameras under the Pentax name.

Push button control is not my favorite way to set a camera.  Using the exposure compensation control to set the ISO for a non-DX coded cassette is awkward because the exposure compensation setting reverts to zero whenever the camera is turned off. The fact that the camera uses AA batteries instead of an expensive lithium battery is a positive feature.

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