Camera

When promoting the V10 LG has spent most of their time focusing on the V10’s camera features. They have promoted it as being a great on the fly video recorder, especially using their on the fly editing software that lets you record small clips and combine them into a video. This is great for recording trips and is similar in a lot of ways to Vines and Snapchat stories only it is all on your phone. For our testing, I focused on photos just for comparison to past phone reviews. To do this I take a few similar pictures to get an idea of the main camera performance in different lighting situations. But first I wanted to take a look at the phones camera app itself. Especially with one of the V10’s main features being a full manual mode. As you can see below in manual mode we gain access to shutter speed, ISO speed, white balance, even a full manual focus. Up along the top all of the information is documented as well so you can see the settings on the fly. Typically, when I use a phone camera it is a quick on the fly thing, but it Is really nice to have the option to get into the details when its needed.

For starters on my testing I take a shot outside in full mid-day lighting. I was happy with the performance here, it captured the different colors in our bush. Most cameras don’t struggle here though so let’s get into the lower lighting situations.

I took our standard lazy cat photos. This was mid-day inside with no inside lighting on. The room was well lit from the windows but having the window in the background made our shots a little to dark. Turning and using the window in the third photo really made a difference.

Next I use our small quadcopter with its LED lights to test no lighting, photo lighting, then the cameras flash. This is always a very hard shot because of the bright LEDs and the detail of the small quad. The no backlighting photo come out a little washed out. The camera had a hard time focusing on the quad with the bright lights. Next with the photo lighting turned on the shot looks amazing and crisp. The last shot is using the auto setting and the cameras LED flash. The quad looks crisp and in focus but the LED flash struggled to light up the whole area when taking a semi close-up shot. Other shots using the flash came out slightly better when the flash had room to light up a wider area, but as usual the flash is the weak point on this and really all mobile phone cameras. Overall though I was very happy with the camera on the V10, it did better job with up close macro shots than any other phone I have tested and it handled low light better as well.

I went ahead and included this fun mode shot that takes advantage of both of the front facing cameras to show the difference in the wide angle and standard angle cameras. The wide angle better shows your background and looks more like a normal picture where the normal lens is much closer and feels like its in your face.