LG GD550 Pure review: Slide and go

Disappointing 5 megapixel camera

The LG Pure boasts a 5 megapixel auto-focus camera with no lens protection or LED flash though we’ve seen a pre-production sample of GD550 that has a LED flash but we’re not sure whether it would get to mass production.

The camera user interface is the same thing we saw in the BL20 New Chocolate and uses the same black and white color scheme. The available features are even fewer than those in the BL20.

The camera itself has no special features on offer other than auto-focus. In the user configurable settings are some effects, light sensitivity up to ISO 800, burst mode, white balance, brightness and timer.

The viewfinder layout is simple: a column on the bottom where you can toggle between the still camera and video recorder, set brightness options, go to the media album or toggle landscape and full screen view. All the other stuff is packed in the settings.

You can use the confirm button of the touchpad as a shutter key too, but if you do there's no way to recompose the shot after locking focus.

The camera UI looks outdated and LG really should have put a bit more work into it.

The camera UI

As far as the image quality is concerned, it didn’t manage to impress us. Images lack fine detail and there are some artifacts caused by the aggressive compression, noise reduction and oversharpening.

On the positive side the colors in most cases are accurate and lively and there is no purple fringing.

One negative side to imaging is that the camera sensor is oriented so as you should take your landscape photos while you hold the GD550 Pure in portrait position. If you rotate it to a landscape position, you’d get portrait-oriented photos.

LG GD550 Pure camera samples

Synthetic resolution

We also snapped our resolution chart with the LG GD550 Pure. You can check out what that test is all about here.

LG GD550 Pure resolution chart photo • 100% crops

Video recording

The LG GD550 is capable of capturing D1 (720 x 480 pixels) videos @ 30fps, which sounds great on paper but in reality things are quite different. Videos lack detail and there are visible compression artifacts.

Again you should record videos holding the phone in an upright, portrait position as this is the way the camera sensor is oriented.

Here goes a sample video clip.

Web browser is fine

The web browser on the LG Pure is basic, but reasonably good. It renders most of the web pages very well, but the smallish screen and lack of Flash support make it really just an extra, not something you can seriously surf on.

The web browser of the GD550 has a virtual mouse pointer that jumps between links. In most cases the mouse pointer moves rather logically and does the job right.

To zoom in or out, use the star and hash buttons.

The LG GD550 Pure web browser

In the settings you can find some options for caching web pages and accepting cookies. Finally, you can disable images to save on data traffic.

You can open up to two pages simultaneously from the menu. We tried watching mobile YouTube videos and it worked like a charm.

Tabbed browsing • watching streaming media