LG GC900-Multimedia(Camera)
The LG Viewty Smart has an 8 Megapixel CMOS camera. It uses auto-focus mechanism and Schneider-Kreuznach optics. The flash has been downgraded from the previous xenon flash on the Viewty to just a single LED in the Viewty Smart. There is however no lens cover, just as before, which leaves the lens terribly exposed to fingerprints and scratches. The weird zoom mechanism surrounding the lens of the previous Viewty has now been moved to the volume keys.
The camera app is pretty well-designed. It has all the features easily accessible through on-screen icons. There are plenty of features available which, apart from the standard set common on all phones, also includes manual focus adjustment, face detection, smile detection, geo-tagging, etc.
We had high hopes for the camera in the Viewty Smart because its predecessor had one of the best 5 Megapixel camera of its time. Also, it is the first 8 Megapixel camera phone from LG in India (the Renoir never made it here). The fact that the competition has some pretty great 8 MP phones of their own and I was sure that LG would have brought something good to the table that would at least match if not exceed what the competition has to offer.
Unfortunately, the Viewty Smart came nowhere close to matching the quality of the current crop of 8 MP phones. In fact it couldn’t even come close to the quality of its predecessor. The image quality on the Viewty Smart is pretty bad and it is disappointing to see a phone in this price range perform so poorly.
The images were dark, had poor derails, had horrific amount of noise in them and were dotted with tiny white spots all over. The focusing was also not perfect and on some occasions the phone would just refuse to focus on the subject. This was doubly true when shooting at night. The single LED flash was decent for shooting subjects within a meter; however, for anything further away you’d miss the xenon found on the original Viewty.
The video recording too was disappointing. The original Viewty could do VGA resolution at 30 FPS and had a special slow motion mode where it would record in 120 FPS. More importantly it would record the videos in DivX format, which was far superior to 3GP format videos. Despite the fact that the Viewty Smart could record in 720 x 480 at 30 FPS, it does so in 3GP format. Also, it does not shoot in 120 FPS in slow motion mode.
The same issues plague the recorded videos as they do to the captured images. In the dark the quality drops down to really low levels and it is best to avoid shooting at night.
When compared to phones like the Samsung Pixon/Ultra Touch, the Nokia N86 8MP or the Sony Ericsson C905, the camera quality of the LG Viewty Smart doesn’t even come close.
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· Tags: camera, LG GC900, Multimedia
