Hey guys, just to follow up the first part of the LG Renoir review which we did before Christmas. In this second part of the review, we’re going to focus on the Renoir’s fantastic 8-megapixel camera and some fun multimedia features. As you will be aware from the specs of the KC910, it comes with 100MB of internal memory much like the Viewty, this doesn’t really have much effect on what you do because it comes with a 8GB microSD memory card anyway which is used to store all the photos and videos it takes, of course you can choose to store these in your internal memory as well should you choose to do so.
Before we show you some sample pictures and videos, an essential feature to go with any high performance multimedia camera phone is a good, user friendly file browsing interface, so that you can easily take a quick peek at the photos or videos you’ve just taken or documents you’ve just stored. File browsing on the LG Renoir KC910 is generally fast but with browsing the external memory each time you open the file browser it needs to refresh the image thumbnails. If you have a lot of images it can lag abit, as the whole thing will take up to a good 5 seconds. Other than that there are no noticeable lags in file browsing.
Another very minor shortcoming that won’t be very important to most users we noticed was with file sorting. No matter which you opt for (date, type, name) the files on the memory card always get listed first. While that doesn’t sound like a big deal, it should have been up to the user to decide, not software engineers.
The Renoir had no problem reading custom folders off the memory card, unlike some midrange LG phones.
Image Gallery
The Gallery function is basically the LG Renoir’s file browser for showcasing pictures you’ve taken or have stored in the memory card. LG have vastly improved their image gallery with the LG Renoir and now it offers a great touch experience. It is possible to ‘flick’ the screen with your fingers to scroll across the image thumbnails, it feels smooth, not laggy and works in both landscape and portrait mode. Unfortunately, zooming on an image is a bit slow and works in quite small steps.
LG Renoir also has an image editor, which offers a wide range of options. First off, you get a creative part that allows finger drawing on images, text typing, clipart watermarking, face morphing, selective colorization, and selective color boosting. Then you have options for basic image treatment tools such as rotate, resize and mirror, as well as more advanced photo editing options such as levels, brightness, contrast, color, hue and saturation, sharpness, blur. Red-eye removal is also available. And finally, you can add color effects such as black & white, sepia, negative, glow, etc. An extra feature to the image editor is Face beautify, which softens skin and enhances skin tones. However, it doesn’t really function as well as claimed, and we had several instances of enhancements being applied to only parts of the subject’s face resulting in rather ugly transitions.
As you know the LG Renoir KC910 is currently one of the biggest competitors on the mobile market to pack a high spec 8-megapixel camera.
Here is what the camera has to offer:
- 8 megapixels
- Autofocus with touchshot (see below on what that means)
- Maximum image resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels, other resolutions include:
- 5M 2592 x 1944 pixels
- 3M 2048 x 1536 pixels
- 2M 1600 x 1200 pixels
- 1M 1280 x 960 pixels
- 640 x 480 pixels
- 320 x 240 pixels
- Or size small enough just for contacts
- Shot modes:
- Normal
- Smile
- Beauty
- Art
- Continuous
- Panorama
- Frame
- Scene modes:
- Auto
- Portrait
- Landscape
- Night
- Beach
- Sport
- Colour effects:
- Black and white
- Negative
- Sepia
- Posterize (quite fun!)
- Blink detection
- White balance
- Macro
- Self-timer
- ISO (1600 – 100)
- Quality (Normal to Super fine)
- Back light compensation
- Switch between inner and outer camera, perfect for updating profile pictures on social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter
- Geo-tagging
- Zoom
- 4x
- 8x
- 16x
- Image stabilisation
- Xenon flash (no LED flash)
- Video recording options vary from VGA@30fps videos through slow-mo QVGA@120fps to time-lapse QVGA clips
