LG's Optimus 7 & Samsung's Focus Reviewed: A Tale of Two Windows Phones

Camera

Comparing smartphone cameras isn’t as easy as you’d think. You can take a bunch of shots in similar settings with different phones, but as with most things in this industry the manufacturers are all engaged in a high stakes game of tradeoffs. The obvious tradeoff up front is sensor quality vs. cost, once you make that tradeoff however there’s a lot more to worry about.

Much of how these cameras behave is up to software. There are certain things the iPhone’s camera does extremely well, and other things it just can’t ever seem to get right (e.g. white balance in certain types of CFL light). There’s also the debate of capturing reality vs. capturing what looks good. Oversaturating colors and employing TV-maker-style tricks come to mind here.

The Windows Phone 7 cameras we’ve played with have all been able to produce decent photos for web use. Given enough light and a very steady hand, you can even produce some sharp enough shots for small format prints.

I mention needing a steady hand because you are forced to use the physical shutter release button on the phone itself. The act of pushing down the button is often enough to blur a relatively slow rolling shutter.

Despite Microsoft mandating that all Windows Phone 7 devices have at least a 5MP camera, and supplying the default camera app, settings do vary between devices. For example, the HTC Surround allows you to set capture resolution but not compression level. The Focus and Optimus 7 let you do both.

The Optimus 7 adds a bunch of scene settings driven by LG’s own customizations, while the Focus has an option to enable “wide dynamic range”. The full breakdown of what you can do on these three phones is in the table below:

It’s perplexing. Given how strict Microsoft has been elsewhere in the OS, even mandating what Start screen tiles OEMs/carriers are allowed to customize, this seems like a tremendous oversight. At the bare minimum all WP7 devices should have the same basic options to control things like JPEG quality and white balance.

The Focus has more normal camera settings while the Optimus 7’s settings are more geared towards scene control. The settings do tangibly change the image you get out of the camera in both cases.

Resolution options are also somewhat different between cameras. Although all three cameras have 5MP sensors the resolutions exposed vary among vendors:

All three phones above feature a 4:3 5MP sensor. Only the Optimus 7 lets you shoot in a cropped 16:9 mode however. Samsung also crops its 5MP mode to 4,915,200 pixels, while the other two phones give you 5,038,848 pixels in their highest resolution mode. It’s not a big deal by any means, but curious nonetheless.

So how do these phones function as cameras? Both feature an LED flash, although the Optimus 7’s lens/flash cluster looks a bit fancier. As I mentioned before, I’d say both phones are easily capable of web quality photos; using the high resolution for detail in smaller photos vs. enabling huge images.

Samsung Focus

LG Optimus 7

Apple iPhone 4

I’d argue that the Focus generally produces better looking images, at least more colorful, better exposed and marginally sharper ones.

Samsung Focus

LG Optimus 7

Apple iPhone 4