For the most part, the images are good, if not on par with other cameras out there. From far back, the images are sharp and detailed enough, though up close, it’s easy to see softness, so don’t expect this to replace your dedicated camera any time soon.
In daylight, the images pop and look good, with low-light also providing some decent power, though don’t expect a lot of control when you’re taking photos.
For the most part, LG seems to have taken a pretty minimalist approach to the camera controls, with a simple “touch here to take pictures” approach. There’s no manual control whatsoever, which is an interesting omission.
Overall, though, there do seem to be less features for the camera itself, and that means you won’t find a lot of effects for the on-board camera, if any at all.
If you’re just sending your photos straight to Instagram or Snapseed, that’s probably not a concern, but if you loved the pixelation look or monochromatic sepia-tones other software cameras give you, LG’s software won’t provide any of that.
There are a few extra modes, though, with LG providing a panorama mode, dual-camera activation (your picture from the front-facing shooter pasted on the picture from the main rear camera), and a “magic focus” mode, which recreates the Lytro-like focus later style of photography.
The front-facing camera also comes with its own little neat feature, such as a flash mode, which isn’t really a flash. Rather, it sets your image inside a border of a rather bright colour for the screen, acting almost like a ring flash for your face and lighting you up from the front.
That’s a neat idea, and it’s one that could work for all the self-portraits you might take in the dark dingy poorly lit nightclubs where you desperately wanted to show that you visited.
Another neat concept for the front camera is the gesture for starting the self-camera timer, which basically tracks you open hand (palm up, fingers out, like you’re showing the number five on your hand), and waits for you to close it, balling it into a fist. Once that’s been seen, a three second timer starts, and then your picture is taken.
And if you don’t want to do that, you can always press the volume down on the back of the phone. That takes a picture, as well.
There are also some bonuses that help to increase the appreciation of the handset, such as support for wireless charging inside the unit, upgradeable storage thanks to microSD (something that was missing on previous LG G-series phones), and some support for 24-bit FLAC files, making it possible to play back audio in one of the highest formats out there.
If you have some fantastic headphones, it means you don’t need to go out and buy a high-res audio player, like the one Sony makes, and can simply rely on a phone for this to work.
For what it’s worth, LG’s G2 had this support too, but the phone limited you to fixed storage inside the handset, and when you’re talking over one gigabyte per one hour album, and you mix that with storage for photos, videos, apps, and games, this limits what you’re likely to store considerably.
Fortunately, with microSD storage on the G3 supporting up to 128GB, there’s loads of room to move, and if you’re buying high definition audio, you can use this phone to listen in without dramas.
As good as this product appears to be, though, there is no perfect product. You can attain close to perfection, don’t get us wrong, but we’re critics, we’re reviewers, so we can always find something wrong with a product.
In the LG G3, those flaws come from a few areas, with the performance seemingly affected by this new screen technology, the chassis material used in the construction of the phone, a mediocre on-screen keyboard, and a feature missed out by the G3 and yet found on one of its key competitors.
Let’s start with the performance, since this is a noticeable one, and it’s expressed through small amounts of lag that occur when you’re trying to run applications: simply put, you press an app through it’s shortcut, and rather than load straight away, there’s a minor pause — maybe half a second — and then it runs.
And that’s not a one-off thing either, as it happens pretty much all the time, which is strange since the system isn’t struggling with its quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor and 2GB of RAM.
We’re not entirely sure on this one, but what we think is going on here is that the extra pixels required for that amazeballs screen are slowing down the processor marginally. There are more to show, obviously, since 2560×1440 is bigger than 1920×1080, and rather than be optimised out of the box, the system is just a wee bit slower than it should be.
For us, that’s a little like the first run games for the Xbox One and PS4 not being as fast as they should be out of the box, since you learn more about how to tweak and control hardware as time goes on, not from the first retail sale, and just like the future games will load and perform faster for those video game consoles, firmware updates for the G3 could easily fix this, as will subsequent hardware versions.
But it is a first generation hardware issue, and a minor one at that. We just know you expect us to report on these things, so there it is, in the flesh for you to read.
Go on LG, release an update to your G3 to fix this. Prove us right. Please.
