LG W30 hands-on review

Camera

The LG W30 has a triple camera system, which is really just two cameras consisting of a 12MP primary wide-angle and a 13MP ultra-wide-angle camera. The third camera is just a 2MP depth sensor for the portrait mode images.

The camera software is extremely bare-bones, with just a handful of modes and some quick toggles to switch to video or the ultra-wide-angle lens.

Camera app

In terms of image quality, the main 12MP camera is quite ordinary. The level of detail is adequate as long as the subject is relatively close to the lens but in landscape shots things tend to get a bit fuzzy. The dynamic range also isn't particularly good. The only good thing is the color rendering and the general white balance, which tended to be quite accurate.

General camera samples

The ultra-wide-angle lens was reasonably sharp with good details. However, there was noticeable distortion around the edges, which could not be corrected from within the phone. The ultra-wide-angle lens images also had a very different color and white balance profile and often delivered significantly more saturated and cooler images for the same scene compared to the standard wide-angle lens.

Wide-angle vs ultra-wide-angle

The HDR mode generally worked well, bringing out more detail in both the highlights as well as the shadows. However, in some scenes, especially outdoors under the sun, the HDR mode tended to desaturate the images a bit.

HDR Off • HDR On • HDR Off (ultra-wide) • HDR On (ultra-wide)

The video quality is decent. Both lenses produce reasonably sharp 1080p videos. Unfortunately, there's no image stabilization so it ends up being quite shaky even if you're standing still.