LG KG920 vs. SE K800 vs. Nokia N73: One more photo shootout

Introduction

Recently we’ve got LG K920 for testing; this is one of the first 5MP camera GSM phones available on the market. We’ve decided that it’s a good idea to test it against one of the best currently available 3MP camera phones, and also great rivals – Sony Ericsson K800 and Nokia N73.

The contestants: LG KG920, Nokia N73 and Sony Ericsson K800

We, on other hand, just can’t tell you which of the 3 megapixel shooters to choose. However it’s more important for us to tell you what the differences are, so you can choose for yourself.

The Nokia N73 produces over-saturated, over-sharpened, high-contrast photos. For the untrained eye these photos have more punch, more “wow” factor. When shooting a dull scene this approach produces more pleasant results. The problem comes when the scene is colorful and contrasty. Then the extra processing can lead to unnatural looking photos. It’s quite ironic that Nokia N73 won its fans taking the idea of the so called “Sony colors” to extremes. Some years ago Sony used to boost the color saturation of their digital cameras as an extra advantage over their rivals. They don’t do this anymore in their recent models.

On the other hand Sony Ericsson K800 has more laid-back approach – the photos aren’t over processed, which ensures better results if you are going to edit them later.

It’s not fair

Yes, it’s not fair to compare 5 megapixels to 3 megapixels camera. However, we are doing it for you to see what the difference is and if an upgrade is worth it.It’s tricky to compare photos with different resolution as in our case. To be able to compare apples to apples there are two approaches. The first one is to downsample the higher resolution photos to the lower resolution, but this will reduce the advantage of the higher resolution camera, and the amount of the sharpness applied in the post processing might be taken as a real ability to resolve detail. The other approach, the one we chose, is to upsample the lower resolution images to the higher resolution. This method shows about the same results you would get if you print the images. The con is that the jpeg artifacts get enlarged too, which is not fair to the lower resolution cameras, but this is a minor concern.

When viewing at actual 100% size the 5 megapixel photos and even the 3 megapixel ones just don’t fit in the nowadays monitors. You usually see a small portion of the photo and scroll around. In this shootout we are taking a different approach. For all the photos we are showing you 1024×768 versions, downsampled in a special way. We’ve tried to eliminate as much as possible the difference in the sharpening applied in the camera processing. This downsampled photos can be used to evaluate the color and exposure accuracy or the dynamic range. To get however a correct presentation for the resolution of the cameras, you have to look at the crops on the right. As explained above, these are made by upsampling the K800 and N73 photos to 5 megapixels resolution and then cropping the same part of the image.

Studio shots

This test was carried out under the same lighting conditions we use to make the photos for all our reviews. The scene is lit by white light sources.

LG KG920 (full) • Sony Ericsson K800 (full) • Nokia N73 (full) • crops

LG KG920 shows at the same time better resolution, correct colors and lower noise levels. Although the phone manufacturers don’t publish the specs for the sensor used in their camera phones, photos like this make us think that KG920 have a sensor with larger physical dimensions than the ones used in the phones, maybe this is the same sensor used in some low-level digital cameras. The colors of K800 are quite off (especially the green), while N73 has e serious problem with the yellow – the oversaturation sometimes comes at a price, look at the yellow cube.

LG KG920 (full) • Sony Ericsson K800 (full) • Nokia N73 (full)

We are sorry, that we can’t show you crops for this image, because it was framed somewhat differently on the three phones, but we are showing you the full resolution images instead. Again, excellent results from LG KG920. Nailed color balance, lower noise than the rivals and amazing resolution. There is one more thing to note here – look at the highlights of paper clips. LG KG920 shows a lot better control of the highlights, the overexposed areas of the paper clips look more natural in KG920 photos. All in all – great macro results from the 5 megapixel contestant.

LG KG920 • Sony Ericsson K800 • Nokia N73 • crops

Outdoor photos

LG KG920 (full) • Sony Ericsson K800 (full) • Nokia N73 (full) • crops

The first thing we notice on this set of photos is the yellowish cast of the KG920 photos. The resolution advantage is here, but it’s not as pronounced as in the previous samples. Sony Ericsson K800 shows the most accurate colors. Nokia N73 has troubles with the high contrast scene this time – look at the arcs, they are overexposed and snow white.

LG KG920 (full) • Sony Ericsson K800 (full) • Nokia N73 (full) • crops

First, let’s look at the tree branches on this photo. Nokia N73 manages to show more resolution than K800 here and it’s very close to KG920. Looking at how sharp the images from N73 are we start thinking that it just doesn’t have a low-pass filter installed, or it’s somehow tweaked. The low-pass filter exists in one form or another on almost all digital cameras; it improves the image quality in several ways, for example eliminating jagged edges, moiré and color shifting. The down side of the low-pass filter is that softens the image.

None of the phones in the tests managed to get the colors of this scene right. The real colors looked somewhat like the result of Nokia N73, but a lot less saturated. In fact the colors of N73 are so much saturated that the train looks like it comes from an animation movie. LG KG920 shows again yellow cast, while the K800 results are slightly reddish.

LG KG920 • Sony Ericsson K800 • Nokia N73 • crops

LG KG920 • Sony Ericsson K800 • Nokia N73 • crops

These two sets of images show almost exactly the same results as above.

LG KG920 • Sony Ericsson K800 • Nokia N73 • crops

Naturally, the image from KG920 looks smoother than the 3 megapixel cameras, but we just can’t find any real resolution advantage over them. Sony Ericsson K800 presents this scene better than Nokia N73 – it shows the correct colors and handles the highlights in a more natural way.

LG KG920 • Sony Ericsson K800 • Nokia N73 • crops

Here again the Sony Ericsson K800 gets the colors right and shows about the same resolution as Nokia N73. LG KG920 gains some advantage over the previous image – it seems the closer the object, the better it performs.

LG KG920 • Sony Ericsson K800 • Nokia N73 • crops

LG KG920 shows good results here, you can see the resolution advantage in the crops. Both K800 and N73 shows also good results for their class, but look at the purple color between the branches in the Nokia N73 photo – maybe this sharpness comes at a price?

Indoors

LG KG920 (full) • Sony Ericsson K800 (full) • Nokia N73 (full) • crops

Indoors, where the light is not that strong, LG KG920 has the chance to use it’s larger sensor for a bigger advantage. Indeed its pictures look more like made from a digital camera, than from a phone. The yellow cast is here again, but it’s normal in this environment.

What’s more interesting in this comparison is the Nokia N73 result – look at the holiday lights. In reality they are white, like on the photos of KG920 and K800. Nokia N73 however shows random colors in the lights. This again makes us think that Nokia N73 lacks a low-pass filter. Color artifacts like these in the small white objects, are usually caused by the lack of such filter.

You can see exactly the same here – these lights are white, Nokia N73 just loves to make the things colorful.

Using the flash

LG advertises the flash in KG920 as “strobe flash”, which means that this is not the type of LED flash used in most of the mobiles phones. It’s more like the xenon flash in Sony Ericsson K800, so we expected similar performance. Nokia N73 has standard LED flash only, so even on paper it can’t compete with the others.
LG KG920 • Sony Ericsson K800 • Nokia N73 • crops
LG KG920 • Sony Ericsson K800 • Nokia N73

The first test was against a white wall from about one meter. Here KG920 shows the best results – the object is well lit and the color of the background is almost uniform.

LG KG920 • Sony Ericsson K800 • Nokia N73

The second test is against a brick wall from about two meters in almost total darkness. For our surprise here the LG KG920 failed miserably. It seems that its flash was not as strong as the one of K800. Moreover KG920 doesn’t boost the sensitivity in this situation to compensate for the insufficient light. In this scene even N73 delivers better results than KG920. So, if you want good results with KG920, make sure you shoot from close range.

Performance

Sony Ericsson K800 wins by a small margin here. Nokia N73 is a smartphone and is expected to be slower, but in reality is not much slower than K800 in both focusing and saving times. The auto focus reliability is very high on both 3 megapixel cameras. LG KG920 disappointed us in this aspect. Yes, it should process a lot more data, as it works with larger photos, but the saving time was just too long. The auto focus is not that reliable as in the 3 megapixel photo mobiles and the shutter works somewhat strange – it you full-press from the beginning, you might not be able to take the photo. We should also note that the shot-to-shot time of KG920 is more than 10 seconds.

Conclusion

As we expected, in almost all of the test LG K920 showed better ability to resolve detail than it’s 3 megapixel rivals. No surprises here. It also showed amazing macro capabilities and better dynamic range. What stops us from highly recommending it is the really slow performance and the yellowish tint on auto white balance outdoors. As for the Sony Ericsson K800 and Nokia N73 – they are equally good photo devices, but tuned differently. It’s just a matter of preference – if you like your photos with more “wow” factor and never plan to edit them later, then your safe bet is Nokia N73. Otherwise, if you want your photos as accurate as possible and preserving as much detail for further editing, then you should go with Sony Ericsson K800.

Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/kg920_k800_n73_photo-review-125p3.php

LG KG920

LG KG920 review: 5 megapixel exotic

Last year we stood and watch megapixels grows and grow, and just when we thought that the cameraphone battle would continue in another direction – additional features such as auto-focus, better camcorder capabilities, etc. we saw a GSM mobile phone with a 5 megapixel camera. Well, here it is, the LG KG920 finally arrived at our test site and we grabbed it with hands itching to go out and shoot something… Shoot with the camera, that is. The 2” TFT display with a QVGA resolution, a miniSD memory card slot and a clever rotating design all add up to make the LG KG920 an interesting proposal and a lot of fun too. It’s our job to get on to it and see for ourselves (and for yourselves for that matter) if it’s got what it takes to rule the current cameraphone market.

LG KG920

Key Features:

• 5 megapixel camera with auto focus and strobe flash
• Solid metallic construction
• Swivel body design
• USB mass storage support
• miniSD memory card slot

Main Disadvantages:

• Hefty weight
• Far too many buttons
• Slow camera interface
• Slow image browsing
• Inadequate web browser

Koreans have been enjoying 5 megapixel cameraphones for quite some time now. The original version of the KG920 – the LG SV550 has been available since 2005. Current Korean CDMA mobiles have reached the heights of 8 and 10 megapixels already. The GSM world is far from those achievements though and a 5 megapixel GSM cameraphone can no doubt make the headlines with an ease. The same would happen with Nokia N95 which is the next 5 megapixel GSM cameraphone to appear on the market.

LG waited for almost a year to announce a GSM version of their SV5500. Supposedly they would try to build on the success of their innovative LG Chocolate phone so their timing for releasing the LG KG920 has its marketing strengths. Since the cameraphone is rather expensive, riding the wave made by the previous successful mobiles can be of nothing less than in its favor.

Buttons all over

Truth be told, LG KG920 has a quirky design – it’s one of those designs that you just love or hate from the very first glance. The first impressions we got when we saw the device was that it had pretty solid construction. The metallic parts, the high-quality plastics and the visible bolt heads add to the feel of a very sturdy build. The KG920 is not among the smallest or slimmest devices with its dimensions of 108 x 50 x 18 mm, nor is it among the lightest ones with its impressive weight of 138 g which is more suitable for a smartphone or even a PocketPC. Our opinion is that the dimensions are pretty ok, only the weight is a bit too much for our taste.

The LG KG920 compared to Nokia N73 and Sony Ericsson K800

The front panel has a rather intriguing design since the keypad is situated in the lower half of the panel. The top part doesn’t feature a navigation D-pad, but three contextual soft keys. Most of the time you would end up using only two, but there are instances where a third option appears – for example they come quite handy in the camera interface. On both sides of the soft keys you can see the green and red receiver keys. The navigation D-pad is placed on the further right side of the keypad. There are some icons on it which designate the preset function of the corresponding directional key.

The unusual keypad

As we already said, the keypad has a rather strange design due to the rotating construction. The keypad is located on the front part of the rotating part, while the 5-megapixel camera lens is located just on the opposite. The swivel joint has a pretty solid feel to it and we doubt that it might cause any problems in future. Rotating it to 180’ degrees allows you to take a self-portrait picture while still using the display as a viewfinder. Our impression is that there really isn’t a need for that functionality. One could live with it anyways, but the real issue is that it affects the user-friendliness. The reason for the quirky placement of the navigation D-pad is exactly that rotating swivel design. What is more, this is also the reason for the small alpha-numeric keys. Just the opposite, the correction C key just below the D-pad is extremely large when compared to the other keys.

The lower rotating part: rotated half the way • fully rotated

Speaking of strange keys placement we should add that the front panel incorporates several more keys. Those are two dual shortcut keys – one starts the MP3 player and can be used for toggling the flash settings in the camera menu. Furthermore it can toggle the self-portrait’s timer. The second dual key is used for controlling the digital zoom.

The additional shortcut keys

The left side of the handset incorporates the miniSD memory card slot, the charger port and the headset port.

KG920 left side view: memory card slot • charger port • headphones port

The right side of the KG920 hosts the camera release key which is positioned on a special elevated plate which makes it more comfortable to use. Just beside that are the two volume control keys.

KG920 right side view: camera shutter key • volume keys

The top and bottom side of the LG KG920 are pretty bare and don’t feature any special elements.

Top side view

Flipping the phone around reveals the back panel, the 5 megapixel camera lens and the bulging battery. The camera lens has a mechanic cover, a LED flash which aids the auto-focus in dark environments and the strobe flash which is almost as good as a regular xenon flash used in digital cameras, only a bit weaker. Just beside the camera lens is the loudspeaker grill.

KG920 back panel • lens cover: closed & opened • loudspeaker grill

The battery of the KG920 can be removed easily revealing the standard SIM card bed. The battery itself is Li-Ion and has a capacity of 820 mAh. According to the manufacturer it should keep the phone running for up to 180 h of standby and up to 3 h of talk time. Real figures are much different of course. When put to low to moderate use the battery charge lasted around 2-3 full days. When used for continued playback, the LG KG920 would stay alive for no more than 6 hours. Generally, do not expect much from it.

Removing the battery

Well, we were very pleased with the construction of the KG920 – it seemed as though it was made to last. No doubt about it, the manufacturer has intended that when creating the design. In the current wave of ultra slim devices, the KG920 main selling point won’t be the dimensions themselves but the exceptional quality of the construction and finish.

LG KG920 held in hand

A touch away

The LG KG920 has a wonderful display, although… we would have liked it better if it was larger. It has a diagonal of 2” and a QVGA resolution of 320×240 pixels. The TFT display can display up to 256K colors. It stays legible even under direct sunlight, although it fades slightly. The backlighting strength is good enough and there are several brightness levels you can choose from according to the environment.

KG920 display in the dark

As we already discussed, the strange design of the keypad proves to be a certain drawback to its ergonomics. Yet those problems seem to disappear with the time and one gets used to it. The feedback of the keys is great and it’s easy to type your messages.

The keys are evenly lit in red and are readily visible in the dark as you may see for yourselves.

KG920 keypad in the dark

Caller ID

When it comes to using the KG920 as an ordinary everyday mobile phone, we were very pleased with how it performed. Signal reception was nice, so was the voice clarity. Speaking of voice quality we would have liked it if the voices sounded a bit deeper. Volume-wise the KG920 has one of the loudest loudspeakers we have seen recently and there is not a chance that you would miss a call in the street. The only problem is that when you walk into a room you have to lower the volume level because in a quiet room environment it’s more than what your colleagues would tolerate. The vibration strength is also very high so you won’t miss a call even if you set the mobile in a silent mode.

An insider’s look

The standby screen of the handset displays info about the battery status and signal strength. The carrier’s name can be turned off and we find that a really pleasant feature that should be seen in other phones too. In standby the two soft keys correspond to the Main Menu and the Contacts menu.

Standby screen

The main menu is a 3 x 4 grid matrix of icons which get zoomed in when you select them. We must admit that the overall color scheme and icons match perfectly the design of the KG920.

Main menu

The submenus are viewed as a list. Generally speaking the LG KG920 lacks any complicated settings and doesn’t require long set-ups. Here are the nice wallpapers that come preinstalled.

Preset wallpapers

In standby the four navigation keys each have a predefined shortcut function. Pressing the LEFT key takes you to the Profile shortcut menu. Pressing the DOWN key naturally takes you to the Phonebook list. Pressing the RIGHT key takes you to a special functional menu that allows you to open the Messages menu, check your voicemail messages, schedule an appointment in the Organizer or schedule an Alarm. Pressing the UP key takes you to the Favorites menu which is a list of shortcuts which is user-configurable.

Standby screen shortcut menu

It’s a good thing that all the menu items have numeric shortcuts assigned to them. You can see those in front of every menu item while browsing the menu.

Numeric shortcut icons in the beginning of each row

Pick one

The phonebook is about average and all we can say about it is that it does its job on a satisfactory level. The phonebook doesn’t have a dedicated main menu icon; instead, strangely enough, it’s positioned under the Organizer menu item.

The phonebook capacity is 1000 contacts which is more than enough for most users. Search is performed through gradual typing of a name’s characters. The phonebook allows the storing of 4 numbers /mobile, home, office, fax/ and an email. Further on, the contact can be included into a caller group or can be assigned a picture. All the available options are showed into separate screens. Generally the phonebook interface has a clumsy design and reminds the phonebook interface of older mobile phones regarding the way the options are ordered and altered.

Phonebook search • Different contact fields: clumsy and inconvenient

An interesting solution is the option to view the contacts list along with the respective pictures.

Viewing the contacts with pictures

Another limitation of the phonebook is that you cannot assign a ringtone to a certain contact of your choice. The only way to do that is by including the contact in a caller group and assigning a specific ringtone to the caller group itself. The KG920 has several preinstalled caller groups which can be customized.

Each caller group has its icon and that can be shown in front of the respective members’ names in the contacts list in order to recognize easily which group they belong to.

Caller groups list with their respective icons

Yet another limitation of the phonebook is that you cannot save a second or a third number to an already existing contact directly from the standby screen. For that you have to find the contact in the phonebook and enter the Edit mode.

Call management

Nothing special in the call records department. They are available as a separate item in the main menu and can also be accessed by pressing the call (receiver) key on the touch pad. In fact pressing the call key takes you to the general list of all dialed, received and missed calls. It has a capacity of 20 numbers. If you wish to see the separate registers you have to go to the abovementioned Call Register menu item. The GPRS data counter is also available in the Call Register menu.

Call register menu

Messaging: heart-warming

The LG KG920 supports the sending and receiving of SMS, EMS, MMS and email messages. Generally speaking, the LG messaging machine managed to surprise us with a few nice features.

When you start a new message you are given the option of choosing among a text message, multimedia message and an email message. If you choose the text type further on you could easily change it by just attaching multimedia content to it and thus turn it into an EMS or MMS.

Messages menu • starting a new message

The phone supports EMS release 5, so it is capable of sending color pictures, sounds, text styles, etc. The message typing is assisted by T9. A thing we noticed is that in order to type a number in your message you need to change to numeric mode (123) and then when you are done, go back to the text mode (abc). That’s really bugging if you have to enter frequently numbers in your messages. It would have been nicer if one could enter numbers by long press of the respective keys which is a standard feature in almost all contemporary phones.

One nice feature is that if you have started a new message and all of a sudden you have to cancel its typing, it’s saved automatically as a draft and next time you decide to start a new message the KG920 not only stores it for you but offers you to continue it from where you left it last time.

Previous draft readily available

Another nice feature is that the KG920 keeps a record of the last numbers you have sent messages to and when sending a new one you can choose among them instead of digging down in the full phonebook list. It’s a feature we would like to see in more phones nowadays.

Recent recipients list is a favorite feature

Another interesting option here allows for typing of color highlighted text. Furthermore there are three available input text sizes as well as options for formatting the text in Italics, Bold, Underline, Strikethrough styles… You could also align the text in the left, right or center portion of the screen. Receiving that kind of formatted text depends on the EMS version support of the recipient’s mobile device.

Typing a message • text formatting options

The email client supports the POP3 and SMTP protocols and as regards sending and receiving text emails it successfully does it job as we managed to found out during the test period. Regarding emails with file attachments it poses rather strict limitations. The maximum size of one sent message is 300 KB along with the attachments, and the maximum size of one received message is 300 KB. In case you have received message with more than 5 attachments, only 5 of them will be received. For each e-mail account you may save up to 50 messages (totally 150 for three accounts), while in the Inbox you can store up to 30 messages for each account. The other 20 slots are reserved for the Drafts and Outbox folders. A good thing is that there is an option to provide a separate username and password for the SMTP server.

Multimedia – worse than expected

The LG KG920 has an integrated memory of 8MB which will prove pretty inadequate for your multimedia needs. The miniSD memory card that comes in the retail package would certainly improve the issue but truth be told, you would be far better off buying an additional one. The maximum external memory size support is unknown but even 1GB of additional memory can really mean a difference.

The File manager appears as a “My stuff” item in the main menu. It includes separate factory preset folders for different multimedia content. In fact these folders are the only ones you will see since the file manager doesn’t actually support user-created folders. There aren’t also any options for marking, copying or moving files between folders. Besides those preset folders there is also an External Memory shortcut which displays the contents of the miniSD memory card. The folders on the memory card are preset too and even if you add new ones through a computer card reader they won’t be listed.

My Stuff menu

Generally speaking, the file browser provides basic functionality and is not really that user-friendly. And when browsing pictures it takes forever to load their thumbnails. You can zoom in pictures too but that’s a painstaking task that really gets on your nerves since it takes ages. The MP3 player, the camera application, and the Photos/Videos album are kept into a dedicated Multimedia menu which can be started with the external camera/mp3 player shortcut key. Now, the Photo album presents the same capabilities as the file manager.

Browsing through stored images

Zooming in an image

There is another photo album too, which even allows browsing the pictures in landscape mode – it’s accessible via a shortcut when the camera is turned on. Too hard to get to; and again, awfully slow.

Browsing in landscape mode

Unfortunately, the MP3 player is on a mediocre level too. The presence of a memory card slot really makes the things a lot easier when it comes to listening to music. The player though doesn’t support playlists and it plays all the files you have saved in the MP3 folder. The supported file formats are MP3, AAC, AAC+, AAC++, WMA, MP4 (audio), and WAV. The AAC support is a good thing since AAC files tend to be smaller in size than MP3. The problem is that it doesn’t read ID3 tags and the tracks in the file list are arranged by the respective file names – ordering by either artist or song name is impossible.

The player cannot work in the background. It has three different animated visualizations which have nothing to do with the music beat itself – just as in the LG KG800 Chocolate – just as opposite to the recently reviewed LG KE800 Chocolate Platinum. They all do suffer from a certain lag. It seems the mobile suffers serious performance issues when it comes to using, browsing or creating multimedia content.

Music player interface • dummy graphic music visualizations

If you receive a call while the MP3 player is playing the song gets stopped and when you end your call it doesn’t start automatically. Further on when you do start it manually, its starts playing the current track from the very beginning.

There are several equalizer presets that you can use in order to enhance the player sound and they do make a difference.

We didn’t have the LG retail headset at our disposal during the test but we were very pleased with the integrated loudspeaker. Given the right equalizer preset is chosen, you can hear lower frequencies better than usual for a mobile phone. To put it simply, it just has more bass. The volume levels are nice too. The LG KG920 is among the loudest mobiles we have laid our hands on recently.

Mega-exciting

Testing the 5 megapixel camera is what we all waited. Well it turned out that it has a nicely designed landscape menu interface with a good deal of customizable options. The pictures taken with it have a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels which is quite good for even A4 prints. We were very pleased with the quality of the samples we took. Its functionality is further enhanced by a strobe flash, which is way better than a LED flash, but weaker than a real xenon flash that for example Sony Ericsson K800 is equipped with.

One of the greatest problems that all LG phones we have tested seem to suffer from is the slowness of the camera application itself. Taking a picture with the LG KG920 takes more than 10 seconds in order to focus on the subject, take a shot at the maximum resolution and save it. Focusing and saving each takes around 4 seconds. That sort of a limitation really doesn’t leave you with a lot of opportunities to express your photographic imagination since you are bound to shooting only still subjects. There is a certain problem with the use of the camera shutter key. Sometimes you just press it and nothing happens. First we thought that it’s a hardware problem but it turned out to be a problem with the camera software itself. You just have to be more precise when pressing it. Turning on the camera shutter sound really helps a lot.

LG KG920 camera viewfinder

Various camera settings

As we already said the camera options are really rich. You may choose from several shooting modes such as Macro shot, Portrait, Landscape, Sports, and Dusk. The flash has a Red Eye mode while shooting can also be done with several color filters (Sepia, Negative, etc.) and in sequence shot of 3 pictures in a row if needed. The white balance has also 5 custom options besides the automatic one. The light metering can be done according to the central spot in the picture or taking into account the whole composition. ISO is adjustable too – you have the choice among the standard ISO 100, 200 and 400. The autofocus can also be set to a central point or to a multi-point evaluation.

Otherwise the picture quality is fine if you managed to hold the phone perfectly still during image capturing. As we already said, the camera is awfully slow. There is a delay between the press of the button and the actual capturing of the photo. That means that most of the time the composition you want to take a shot at has already changed when the actual photographing takes place. The auto focus suffers some issues and fails to deliver in low light environments and low contrast subjects. Generally, it is slower and more unreliable that the ones of Nokia N73 and Sony Ericsson K800. Macro shots turn out just great though.

If you want to know more about the picture quality of LG KG920 it’s best to check our photo shootout, where we compare the Korean 5 megapixel to the best 3 megapixel phones nowadays – Sony Ericsson K800 and Nokia N73.

LG KG920 sample photos, many more in the shootout

Besides the rule-it-all 5 megapixels the LG KG920 has also a nice equipped video camera which shoots video at 320 x 240 pixels resolution at the whopping 30 fps. That alone makes those home videos perfectly watchable and enjoyable. The output format is the usual .3gp. The menu of the video camera is pretty much the same as the one we already described for the still camera with few exceptions.

Various video settings

LG KG920 sample video

Plug in, log on

The LG KG920 features full USB support and the LG USB cable comes along in the retail box along with the phone itself. The great thing about the USB support of the phone is that when connected, the internal memory and the storage card memory appear in the Windows explorer as 2 removable drives just as your regular USB flash drive would. If you receive a call whilst in mass storage mode, the call will be rejected but after you disconnect the handset, you will see the information about the missed calls.

Once again, when saving content to the phone don’t create subfolders since those won’t be recognized and read by the phone file system. Interesting enough, the Photos folder is reserved for the pictures taken using the phone’s camera and the access to it should be used only to transfer the pictures taken from the phone to the PC.

If you need any other type of synchronization between the KG920 and the PC like for items such as the phonebook and the schedule you should use the dedicated LG software LGPCSync that comes on CD along with the phone.

As much as connectivity is concerned, the LG KG920 features 3-band GSM 900/1800/1900 and GPRS support for fast data transfers. There is no 3G or EDGE support.

It also features Bluetooth with the following profiles: Headset, Handsfree Kit, File Transfer, Image printing, Dial-up networking, Business card transfer, Browsing other devices, and Serial port profile.

The integrated WAP browser doesn’t have full HTML capabilities and managed to open only simple HTML pages such as Google. It’s a regular WAP browser used in older phones and its presence here made us scratch our heads. An expensive mobile such as the LG KG920 should have better browser anyways. Even the web browser of budget Sony Ericsson models can easily beat it.

The old school browser

In a timely manner

The Organizer menu features the Calendar and the text Memos items. The Calendar is pretty straightforward – it offers a monthly view for navigation among the dates. Once you find the date you need, simply enter it and add an event. The first day of the week according to the calendar is Sunday – something that’s not that common around whole Europe.

Adding a task to the calendar

The text Memos allow storing some notes. Each note can have maximum 80 characters.

Sample text memo – better not forget this one

The Tools menu also stores some useful applications, though they seem rather standard nowadays. There are the Alarm clock, the Calculator, the Unit converter, the World time clock, and the Voice recorder. The Alarms menu allows for the setting of 5 different alarms which could be repeated Mon-Fri, Mon-Sat or Everyday.

Alarm menu

The Calculator offers rich scientific functions which are pretty out of place having in mind the mediocre technical capabilities of the rest of the phone.

The overcomplicated calculator

The Unit Converter also has a nice list of units such as Currency, Area, Length, Weight, Temperature, Volume, Velocity, and Shoes & Clothes (both very interesting ones).

Unit converter application • converting shoes and clothes sizes

The Voice recorder application has a 20 seconds limitation and what is more the microphone is so insensitive that the application is nearly unusable unless directly spoken to.

The 20 sec voice recorder

Here we also find the setting for the Favorites menu which we spoke of earlier – the one with user-defined shortcuts which you invoke in standby by pressing the UP key on the touchpad.

A mind of logic

The phone we tested had two preinstalled games – the ZooZoo and Othello. Both are classic logic board games. If you are into games of logic, those would definitely seem as a pleasurable pastime.

ZooZoo & Othello games

Final words…

As we draw this review to an end it’s somewhat hard for us to rate the LG KG920. It seems as though that the drawbacks are far too serious to keep out of consideration – the slow camera and the slow image browsing being among the most serious ones. The lack of a proper web browser is really puzzling in these days of high-speed mobile data transfers, where web browsing has turned into a daily routine.

Anyways, when we put it straight – what type of person would buy this mobile? Well it seems like one that likes gadgets, a shutterbug that would like to have a high-quality digital camera always at hand. Well, the KG920 manages to deliver in that department since the pictures taken have a superb quality for a mobile phone. One can get used to the slow camera interface and the strange camera shutter key, no doubt about it. Once you manage to do that, you would most definitely be amazed how fun it could be to use the KG920 in your everyday life.

Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/lg_kg920-review-130p5.php