LG KC910 Renoir preview: First look

Whole lot of camera features

The camera interface has not changed much as compared to the LG Viewty - the changes only concern the accommodation of the various new features and their control. One of the most innovative ideas of LG is the touchscreen focus. You can literally point on the screen which object you want in focus and the LG Renoir will make sure it is.

The camera interface

Of course the LG Renoir introduces a bunch of other tricks to the game. Now you have a face tracking focus, which works nice but can only track one face - group shots are a no-go.

The blink detection feature is another first here, however it doesn't work as expected. Instead of emplying an automatic blink prevention shutter, where you focus and press the button all the way down letting the camera decide when to shoot to avoid blinking, LG have implemented it the other way around. You shoot your image and if there was a blink detected, LG Renoir warns you AFTER the shot has been taken. We doubt that this would turn out a useful feature.

LG Renoir video recording

LG Renoir has also inherited the excellent video recording features of the LG Secret. It shoots video clips in AVI file format utilizing the DivX 5 video codec.

Besides the regular VGA@30fps video recording, the LG KC910 Renoir also offers widescreen video recording 640x384@30fps, which perfectly matches the screen aspect ratio. It can also record high-speed and slow-motion videos in QVGA resolution. In case you are interested in those, you check out our LG Secret video samples, which are pretty much identical.

Otherwise, here's a quick VGA@30fps video sample, which looks great by the way.

LG KC910 Renoir video sample at VGA resolution

The only new stuff in the video recording department is the microphone noise cancellation technology, which stops unwanted background noise from being recorded.

LG KC910 Renoir camera samples

Here are several camera samples produced by LG Renoir and some by Samsung M8800 Pixon.

LG KC910 Renoir camera samples:

LG KC910 Renoir vs. Samsung M8800 Pixon camera samples:

LG KC910 Renoir | Samsung M8800 Pixon

LG KC910 Renoir | Samsung M8800 Pixon

Just to give you an idea of what the LG Renoir photos can turn out with just a wee bit of photoediting, here are their versions edited by us - images are downsized to 1024x768 pixels.

LG KC910 Renoir camera samples at 1024x768 pixels:

Final words

We've got to say that LG Renoir was an immensely pleasant surprise because in our line of work we rarely see so much innovation in the course of two product generations. Other manufacturers (did somebody say Apple?) should definitely take note and act accordingly.

Still, we feel that the LG Renoir could really use a more critical review article that would take into practical consideration its pros and cons, which we cannot cover in full in such a brief article such as this one. Stay tuned, we are already working on it.