Gadgetory

isn't it frustrating watching a phone review and when the reviewer gets to the camera section all-day poster a couple of terrible shots while writing that camera off because it's not on their favorite phone don't you want to know more about a phone camera than what you might learn from a handful of mediocre HDR photos let's do something about this we live in an age where the only camera person might own is the one bolted to the back of their phone so we're going to review that with the same attention we might give a standalone camera there's more to smartphone photography than just mega pickles and selfies shooting in real-world conditions we're going to cover color saturation exposure optics image stabilization bulk a low-light focusing video and any other fun features a manufacturer might have included I'm Juan Carlos bag now for pocket now and here's our real camera review of the LG g5 buckle up folks we've got a lot of ground to cover and we're gonna move pretty quick first a little housekeeping our LG g5 is an 18 T branded unit with dual image sensors onboard the main shooter is very similar to what we saw in the g4 it's a one over two point six inch image sensor paired with an approximately 28 millimeter field of view and an F 1.8 aperture the main sensor captures 16 megapixel stills with a native 16 by 9 aspect ratio and features laser focus assistance the second sensor is paired with a super wide angle lens that captures a 135 degree field of view which is roughly around an 8 millimeter equivalent lens this camera has an aperture of f28 megapixel stills also with a native aspect ratio of 16 by 9 the exact resolution of the sensor is 3840 by 2160 which means this was designed to also capture UHD video both cameras feature optical image stabilization this video review is being uploaded at you HD resolution and any adjustments to photos or videos will be detailed in the upper left-hand corner now starting with still photos and looking at exposure and saturation in trying to produce bright and vibrant images LG still pushes exposure a touch brighter in Auto than I would prefer but for most setups the difference is around a third of a stop in all but the brightest direct Sun situations this last week we had cloudier than usual weather in Los Angeles so the g5 is getting the benefit of softer nicer light in some of our setups than on previous camera tests blues greens Browns earthy and sky tones look fantastic there is a little compression noise in the sky but it's on par with competing cameras warmer colors are always difficult for digital sensors to capture but the g5 is sure-footed with yellows like this hibiscus and direct Sun we still see plenty of petal detail and we're only barely clipping the broadest surface of the flower reds however get a little funky producing a JPEG red start to fear a little more orange than what we've seen on previous LG's of dropping the exposure a half stop gets us back in the ballpark but color processing does seem to be ever so slightly different than what we saw in the v10 overall LG continues to offer terrific dynamic range even on a JPEG we're still able to see the texture of this wall in sunlight without completely losing info and shadows under this Terrace average JPEGs from the main camera between five and eight megabytes in size Rob photos come in at 19 megabytes per exposure which means each shot where a JPEG in a raw file or saved can eat up almost 30 megabytes of storage a cropping in on JPEGs there's a fair amount of noise reduction sharpening being applied to all shots even those in daylight this can create a little splotchiness on edges and fine details which pixel peepers might not enjoy looking at some raw output we can push the recovery of clipped highlights and dark shadows by almost two full stops blowing out the details on this wall walking back the exposure still looks pretty good and all of that texture still exists in the photo exposing specifically for this street lamp we can still pull up quite a bit of detail in the shot from underexposed sections and using desktop software you can pull a bit more sharpness and structure out of each photo before pushing into the smeary territory of the JPEGs from LG zap to be fair the JPEGs produced are actually quite nice for a phone and these defects are only really observed when viewing photos at 100% crops the 16 by 9 aspect ratio guarantees that full resolution photos will occupy your whole phone screen while also being a good fit for most HD TVs many and our audience should be happy to see that maintaining the 16 megapixel resolution of the v10 and g4 means we also have a little more room to crop or zoom in each shot when compared to Samsung's lower resolution galaxy s7 shots at the far end of the zoom will still look blurry and terrible so you'll want to zoom mostly with your feet to maintain image fidelity but a little crop zooming can get you closer to your subject the g5 does feature the nifty trick of incorporating the wide-angle lens into the zoom range when shooting video zooming out will automatically switch to the wider view and zooming in will swap back to the main camera LG still seems to be sourcing a slightly lower quality lens than what we might see on a Samsung or Lumia though it's a touch more prone to fringing and aberration you see the snail shot this curved distortion in the brick or looking at the warped rays of light from the street lamp this isn't terrible performance for a phone but these defects can sometimes prove distracting funnily the wide-angle camera doesn't seem to suffer that exact kind of aberration though the wide lens does have quite a bit of barrel distortion as we push into almost fisheye territory macro performance is respectable we've got a similar close focusing distance as we might find on competitors and the F 1.8 aperture delivers a very pleasant bokeh as objects in the background are nicely blurred out looking at the focusing system LG's laser assisted focus lock is still one of the most sure-footed systems we've ever used though it's not nearly as fast as what we see on the galaxy s7 there's a pleasant slide and lock into focus which looks good as a rack focus effect between two subjects throughout all of our tests we only ran into two situations where the phone was confused by busy scenes and refused to lock on the subject white balance performance is very good the color sensor on the g5 does an excellent job of landing accurate color and with the exception of some of those wonky Reds it's rare that photos are far off the mark from what these scenes look like in real life HDR shots still rely heavily on pulling information out of shadows but we don't see this processing reining in highlights as well as what we see on the iPhone also LG's image capture isn't the fastest and even on subtly moving objects you're apt to see some ghosting on the edges of your subject panorama performance is good but it doesn't quite match the accuracy of Apple or Samsung we see a few breaks and stitching together these power line for example funnily even though the wide lens is almost a one-shot panorama by itself this camera can also be used to capture a panorama shot it's such a wide and distorted field of view though we can get some really funky distortion where seams should have lined up I'm not a huge fan of selfie cameras but the front shooter on the g5 is respectable the eight megapixel stills look decent enough in bright light and aren't completely terrible indoors though we see quite a bit of chroma noise on those lower light shots 1080p video from the front shooter will be twitchy due to a lack of any stabilization and if you want to make yourself look like odo from Deep Space nine you can always slap on a beauty filter the g5 s flash is respectively bright for a single LED solution but the way the phone meters it seems a bit more prone to blowing out highlights than some of the dual LED in color tone flash solutions we've tried recently this camera performs very well at night with very good dynamic range in manual mode the phone uses spot metering and that can sometimes make it a little difficult to expose for the scene as a whole focusing on the darker building blows out the billboard but focusing on the billboard makes the rest of the shot a little too dark overall though I prefer this method of metering as a better guarantees that the subject I'm focusing on is what the camera is going to expose for now we've already seen the lens distortion from this creepy tunnel shot but the overall shot is wonderfully exposed with good contrast very good detail cropped in and noise reduction isn't overly degrading the image here on our creepy gate the g5 gets us pretty close to the actual lighting of the scene as this gate is lit by a really ugly orange yellow security lamp our walkway test shows the same great accuracy between these two bulbs which have different color temperatures and the blown out areas below each lamp are fairly small with some information still recoverable in the raw file these pink flowers lit by a yellow porch lamp look terrific great color very good detail wonderful for a handheld shot and moving to extreme low-light the g5 continues to lock focus in situations which can cripple other phones focusing isn't as fast as what Samsung provides now but LG is still a top-notch performer in almost no light manual modes are always fun for testing long exposure shots throwing the g5 on a tripod you can very easily up some streaking tail light shots happily those manual exposure controls also apply to the wide camera as well and the output from that pairing of wide field-of-view and long exposure can be downright stunning moving to video we take one big step forward from the g4 and one huge step back from the v10 video is saved at a much higher quality than last year's phone that's good news we're now saving just under a 50 megabit per second bitrate up from 30 megabit per second on the g4 and the difference is noticeable better color and contrast for all of our test shots saving higher quality footage means taking up more space and each minute of UHD video from the g5 will come in at just under 400 megabytes of storage the bad news not only our video manual modes from the v10 missing but a number of other basic options are still absent the g5 shoots video very similarly to the g4 using some kind of matrix or averaged metering mode this makes it really easy to blow out the highlights of your subject if the background is a bit darker there are no options to use spot metering which would change the exposure based on where you focus there also is no exposure compensation to adjust the brightness while shooting video which is a shame as that is a very helpful feature for improving our video output our video options are limited to 30 frames per second at 720p 1080p and 2160p there is no control over frame rate or bitrate there is no 60 frame per second option nor the ability to shoot a cinema wide video we can push to a 240 frames per second 720p slow-motion but this is another area where LG is not quite caught up to leaders like Apple the Nexus 6p or even the recently reviewed galaxy s7 video is edgy quality is low and we see a few more dropped frames than I would prefer video does give us a better look at the image stabilization employed LG uses a very wide field of compensation which makes output gel OE this is great for still photos compensating for a wider range of hand movement but it can make video sometimes look a little seasick dropping video quality to 1080p gives us a hybrid software and hardware stabilization option but LG's solution here still hasn't quite caught up to what competitors can provide for smoothing a video out the wide range of hardware compensation introduces subtle warping effects which when paired with pan and scan cropping can look really twitchy or distracting audio is another area improved over the g4 the g5 doesn't quite match the stereo audio from competing manufacturers but the noise reduction filtering on this phone is far less destructive than any other LG we've heard before exposure adjustments are buttery smooth moving from a dark scene to bright and back we see a very pleasant blooming transition which for the first time on an LG matches or maybe exceeds what we saw from the current generation of competing Samsung's during this past though the white balance did have a tendency to overreact pushing to warm then to cool very rapidly before settling on a color temperature for as well-behaved as night photos are tonight videos are often too bright and suffer from quite a bit of noise due to using higher ISO settings than we really need we start to see an almost purple tone to some videos because of that additional chroma noise again there's no way to rein this in by adjusting the exposure and that brings us to the wide-angle camera you didn't think we'd forgotten about it did you it's a whole separate camera and likely could survive a whole separate review now in a previous video I described to this 135 degree field of view as approaching fish eye style lenses and someone was correct in the comments to point out that focal length does not determine whether a lens is fisheye even at a crazy wide focal length it is possible to create rectilinear lenses where straight lines aren't curved that does require quite a bit of additional glass to correct for the optical distortions though and there likely isn't enough room on a phone to properly achieve this the lens on the g5 isn't a full-on fisheye lens but we see significant barrel distortion lots of curving and bowing of objects and the horizon is almost always slightly smiling unless it's dead center in your frame but it is an impressive field of view 8 megapixels is plenty of resolution to use here you won't be cropping or zooming from this camera and it's plenty of dots for UHD video in bright light exposure seems to be nearly identical to the main camera but low-light is not this camera strong suit given how much wider this lens is I wouldn't be surprised if this camera had a smaller image sensor than the main camera we seem to be producing a darker image than just reducing the aperture from F 1.8 to f/2 point 4 seeing a real-time transition in video it looks like an almost to stop drop in brightness with these compromises the second camera grants the g5 the most versatile zoom range outside of building a camera with a hardware zoom or a super-high resolution sensor like the Lumia 1020 and even those cameras couldn't push nearly as wide as the g5 can there are some fun features to play with thanks to these multiple cameras you can use the wide camera is something of a shadowbox frame for the main camera in the pop-out mode this combines the output from both and has a few settings to adjust for the wide camera like black and white or blur photo saved remain at UHD resolution to match the wide camera but videos are reduced in resolution to 1920 by 1080 we also have a multi view option where you can use two or three cameras at once again fun to have all three cameras going but this will further reduce video resolution to 720p so let's wrap this up where's that leave us with the cameras on the LG g5 LG strategy is very different than Samsung's where a note should leapfrog an S series phone we expect that each successive generation of galaxies will pick up the camera features of the phone released prior LG on the other hand seems to have drawn a hard line separating G cameras from V cameras though video quality is higher than the g4 the g5 does not receive any of the wonderful video controls the v10 delivered it also lacks any of the basic adjustments we take for granted while shooting video on any other flagship phone photo performance on the main camera is very similar to the g4 which is a good thing and adding the second wide camera makes this a crazy flexible platform the g5 is one of the best overall performers you can buy for Stills though it lacks the raw speed of the galaxy s7 this is still a very fun camera to shoot with and the output is very good ultimately the recommendation for the g5 has to fall on those lines if you shoot a lot of video this probably isn't the phone for you if you're mostly shooting photos we think you'll like what LG has to offer as always folks thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for our continuing coverage of the LG g5 these camera reviews are a new feature at pocket now and they won't survive without your support hitting the thumbs up is appreciated but sharing these reviews on your favorite social services will help sure we can keep producing these camera deep dives for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag Nell you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram is some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next review I totally got it wooo