One of the biggest and most obvious ways that they are starting to differentiate is by putting a focus on photography and videography. However, photography and videography cannot simply be improved by just improving the camera sensor and the lenses as that approach has been the primary way that most OEMs have improved on photography and it has mostly been minor and incremental. At this year’s MWC 2016 in Barcelona we started to see smartphone manufacturers sink some real R&D into their smartphones’ camera systems. Handset brands like LG are starting to employ new technologies and features thanks to new processors like Qualcomm QCOM -1.32%’s Snapdragon 820 to enable a broad set of features, some features that may have existed in past processors but weren’t taken advantage of and others that are entirely new.
What we tested
Today we’ll be reviewing LG’s new G5 smartphone. We managed to get ahold of a pre-production device which means that it has early software and won’t fully represent the final polished software of the LG G5. Taking that into consideration, I wanted to go over the different things that we should be looking at when reviewing these new smartphone cameras and evaluating their new technologies and features. Unfortunately, we were unable to get ahold of the LG G5’s LG Cam Plus attachment which is designed to assist in the use of the LG G5 in photography. Even so, almost all of the G5’s capabilities work without that grip so we can still get a fairly good idea of how it will perform. For this review we will actually be looking at the LG G5 versus the LG G4, giving existing users a good idea of what the improvements are while also showing how LG has improved over the previous generation.
How we tested
In this review, we will be shooting in multiple camera modes, auto, manual, and HDR . However, most of the shots will be taken in auto and HDR because the reality is that most users will be using their phones in auto. In this review, I’ll be attaching side by side images and also test results taken by my colleague Anshel Sag and showing zoomed 100% comparisons to show you exactly what the image quality differences are as well as what to look out for when looking at a new smartphone. All images will start top to bottom or left to right with the LG G5 first, followed by the LG G4. All images are pulled directly from the camera’s JPG files and not modified in any way other than to crop and fit the images side by side and done at full quality in Photoshop CC 2015 v1.2. Both cameras can shoot RAW, however, RAW processing can vary the images drastically and the JPG processing done on the phone is extremely important to test since most people will be using those JPG files.
LG G5 feature adders
The camera itself has a lot of modes which go beyond the standard set of capabilities. The Multiview capability has been done before but on most cameras didn’t enable simultaneous capture. It also has a time lapse capability which the LG G4 didn’t have either. The LG G5 brings in a lot of features that the G4 didn’t have and enables other features only handful of others have like Multiview and time lapse. These modes are only available in auto camera mode.
Forbes