The hottest spot for innovation in smartphone design right now is the camera on the back. These devices have leaped from grainy, awkward replacements for disposable cameras to photo gear to be taken as seriously as any Nikon product.
Whenever a new contender hit shelves we like to compare it to the reigning best smartphone you can buy. Right now that's the Samsung Galaxy S7, which wildly outperformed the previous leader, the iPhone 6s Plus, in our test.
Here's how the LG G5's innovative new dual-camera system stands up to the Galaxy S7:
The G5's main camera and the S7 produce images of good look and feel in easy conditions.
In the even light of the Flatiron District at noon on a cloudy day, these phones produce very similar images in terms of color and exposure.
I leave the cameras in "Auto" mode for these tests, because that's how most people, including the pro photographers I know, work with smartphones. It's up to the phone's silicon brain to expose the image properly, and both devices get it basically right in these conditions. That wasn't a sure thing — LG's last premium phone, the V10, tended to oversaturate daylight images.
One thing I do prefer about the S7's shot here? The aspect ratio. LG likes to give its smartphone camera sensors ultra-wide 17:9 aspect ratios. That's too wide for my taste, cutting off vertical context in a lot of situations and using the lens less efficiently.
Blown up to full size, you can see that the S7 is the sharper camera.
Again proving that bingeing on megapixels is a bad idea for smartphone developers, the 12.1 MP S7 makes a sharper image than the 16 MP G5 here. In fact, the G5's shot hardly even blows up any bigger than the S7's because those 16 megapixels are spread so inefficiently across an ultra-wide sensor.
The G5's lens isn't soft by any means, but it can't match the S7. Look at those bricks on the S7 shot. On the S7 they pop, but on the G5 not so much.
Strangely, it looks like the G5 is even softer than the quite-sharp V10 was in our comparison. However, that was in different lighting conditions at I don't have a V10 to test it against head to head with.
The LG G5 has a second, ultra-wide rear camera.
I took the above video in the G5's picture-in-picture mode, which lets you simultaneously shoot from both cameras at once. While I've argued going ultra-wide as opposed to more zoomed in was a waste of a good idea by LG, it's good to see an attempt at innovation, and the eight megapixel, f/2.4 camera isn't bad in any obvious way. It's just hard to find a good use-case for it.
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