LG KG920 Review

Camera:

In order for a camera phone to be really good, it takes a good hardware – software combination. KG920’s camera hardware is at a particularly high level, but this is not the case with its software. A CCD sensor has been used, which, in theory, ensures better results than CMOS, when used in compact down-market cameras. CMOS is used in almost all ultra budget cameras and in almost all cameraphones. This type of sensor should not be confused with Canon’s upmarket CMOS, available in Canon’s DSLR devices. Thanks to the CCD sensor the pictures are different than those of most other cameraphones, with more detail and less noise.

The camera’s interface starts in 3-4 seconds and provides almost the whole screen as viewfinder. The uppermost line shows the current settings through numerous icons. By pressing the right soft button you can change the settings, including different modes, color filters, flash and quality settings (6 resolutions and 3 compressions). If you select "АЕ" from the mode menu, in the second settings menu (which you can reach be re-pressing the right soft button) you’ll be able to select the value of the white balance and the ISO. Unfortunately, taking pictures takes a lot of time, which is unjustifiable for an up-market camera phone. Focussing is done in no less than 3 seconds and then, 4-5 secs after you have pressed the trigger, the phone asks you whether you want to save the picture, which takes further 10 seconds! Therefore, the time you need to take and save a picture is about 18 seconds. Consequently, you’ll be able to take a little more than 3 pictures per minute. This is a very poor performance and we believe the phone should have been equipped with a much more powerful hardware, capable of saving the large pictures (1.8-2МB) quicker.

Outdoor images
Night images
Macro
1.5meters (4.9feet)	2.5meters (8.2feet)	3.5meters (11.5feet)
Indoor images in bright light

Edited Image

Before / After Edition 100% crop

LG KG920’s main problem is the unrealistic colors it produces when you use the Auto White balance option. Almost all images are yellowish, which dominates over all other colors and replaces them. The images look as if you have applied a yellow filter over them. What is good is the excellent detail it produces, which beats every other phone camera we have seen. It is way better than N95 and K800 in the resolution comparison.

When it comes to macro (close-up photos), this is of great importance, because in macro photos the detail is almost everything. We should thank the 5-megapixel CCD sensor for this detail.

The KG920 isn’t very good when it shoots in low light. Although its flash is supposed to compare with the Xenon of SonyEricsson, its performance is worse, which you can see in our comparison. As it is not a LED, we hoped it would be very good, but it is not. It is fine at small distance though. Shooting night photos (without flash) gives mediocre results, despite the good camera sensor.

We are sure that the KG920’s camera problem is in the software! And in order to show you how good it could be, we edited one of its images. You can see the original (as it came straight out of the camera) above, but here is how we edited it – we put it in PhotoShop (computer application for image manipulation), applied AutoColor function (to edit the yellowish colors, due to the wrong white balance) and Unsharpening Mask, as the KG920 produces soft images. We got an excellent photo, which no other cameraphone can beat, in our opinion.








KG920 is equipped also with a camcorder for recording video clips. On the battery it says: „Full Motion Digital Camcorder phone”, but the potentialities are not amazing. Unlike N95, the resolution is 320х240, which is 4 times smaller than 640х480. The frames are also 30 and you can choose between two types of files: MP4 and 3GP.










MP3 Player:

The music player is nothing special and does not have anything extraordinary to offer, apart from some inconvenience. To start with, we have to point out that you’ll be able to play only the files, which are saved in a particular folder on the card and not directly on the card or in other folders. You’ll not be able to create new sub-folders in the designated one, because you’ll not be able to read the files from such folders. The player offers pretty visualizations and a few different equalizers, but the sound through the loudspeaker is mediocre and the volume is medium-high. We were surprised that the quality was very poor even when we plugged in high-quality headphones by wire distance control. Obviously, the respective chip (DAP) is not of the highest quality.


Software:

Preloaded are two games: ZooZoo and Othello. The first is a variation of the game "Diamond Mine", where you are supposed to arrange three identical pictures one next to the other by simple shifting, and the other is an old "table" strategy. You can add new applications by JAVA.