Recommended. This is an excellent camera for creative photographers. Here are the things I like.

1) The art filters are more imaginative and generally better executed on the CX4 than on cameras from other manufacturers. The “toy camera,” “soft focus,” and “cross process” are all very useful. The “high dynamic black and white” and the “sepia” are much better here than on other cameras I have tried. The sepia is really brown, not the strange pink that you get on Panasonics. And the high dynamic black and white is not just blown-out highlights and inky blacks—it has a range of grays as well.
2) The lens zoom range is very useful, as it goes from a decent wide angle to a very useful 300mm telephoto.
3) The camera is small and easily carried in a pants or shirt pocket, so it is available at all times.
4) There is a range of formats—square 1:1, the 3:2 that emulates the traditional 35mm format, 3:4, and a panorama option.
5) The viewing screen is brighter than the ones on other compacts I have used. No screen is perfect in bright sunlight, but this one is certainly very usable under all conditions. It’s one of the better screens I have worked with.
6) Ricoh, along with Olympus, is noted for its rich colors, and this model inherits that tradition. It’s JPEG-only, but they are nice JPEGs!

I don’t use the CX4 for general snapshots, so I can’t comment on how it does at parties or football games. But the quality of the shots I have made in just plain “camera” mode look good to me. I use this camera (and others—Panasonic LX5 and Olympus EPL-1) for my blogs (http://ingallsgrove.wordpress.com and http://everythingwecomeacross.tumblr.com), so issues of print quality, etc. do not apply.

I have used lots of cameras, including several of the Panasonic travel zooms (which I also like), but the CX4 combines many things I am looking for, notably those well-thought-out creative modes, along with high-quality images, a wide zoom range, and pocketability.

The only thing I would mark it down on is that it’s fairly easy to bump the joystick to the left, which puts the camera in macro mode. Sometimes I have a hard time focusing, and it’s usually because I am trying to take a landscape shot in macro.