Still scratching my head over this one...
I have taken the GR-II with me on a several-months long journey through Latin America. I didn't want to take a DSLR with me for reasons of safety and conspicuousness. And I've been very happy with the results. For three weeks it has taken very good photos. The shadows and highlights aren't as detailed as some lenses on my DSLR, but they're still quite good, and I'm happy with the compromise.
I was shocked after coming back from a visit to Edzna (a Mayan ruin in the Yucatan of Mexico) that all of my photos seemed to be permanently focused in what appeared to be 'Snap' distance, a few meters away. Any photos I took of landscapes looked horribly blurry. It was very bright at the ruins and I remembered remarking while taking pictures 'I thought I remembered a sound playing when the Multi-AF focus was set.
When I returned and saw the photos on the computer, I was rather dismayed, but also concerned. I don't use manual focus very often, and definitely didn't that day. I took the camera for a few test shots and was shocked to see that anything of great distance was blurry (on Multi-AF, Spot, MF, infinity, anything) I began to think my camera had a hardware malfunction - which would be very disappointing, given that I have several months of travel yet and would hate to think of what I would go through to send the GR back for repairs.
As a last effort, I went to the Ricoh site and the knowledge base article had an item on focus problems, and recommended downloading a new firmware if it was available. I noticed the new 1.12 firmware was out, so I tried it, and miraculously the focus is back to normal again. I don't see anything in the firmware specs that mention this fix so I was shocked and very pleased. The post-macro-focus-issue doesn't seem to apply to this issue, since I was constantly turning the camera on and off. I'm still wondering if this was a software or hardware issue, but for now I'm happy to continue traveling and taking landscape photos!
Has anyone else encountered this? If it was a permanent focus problem, I imagine there'd be many upset customers.
Thank you Ricoh (I think)!