LG just announced the G4 in New York City at an event held on the 64th floor of the One World Trade Center building, and it used that illustration to talk about how the South Korean company is taking smartphone photography to new heights. LG’s G4 is the successor to last year’s G3 and while it looks very familiar in some ways it’s an obvious evolution of the design that LG started with the G2 back in 2013. Outfitted with some of the latest specs including a 64-bit hexa-core Snapdragon 808 processor, brilliant new QHD Quantum Display and, of course, what looks to quite possibly be the best camera in a smartphone ever.
Not content with just letting their nifty press conference videos show journalists how good the camera is, LG has released official photos taken by photographer Colby Brown with the G4 for all to see. These photos are completely untouched and taken via the various modes that the smartphone offers including light trail and manual modes. Many of the photos were taken using the new light trail mode, which takes an unlimited number of pictures over a set period of time and then fuses them together. We’ve seen this sort of feature before in phones like the OnePlus One, Oppo Find 7 and a handful of others and it results in a significantly cleaner and clearer image than one taken in auto mode. LG’s mode adds a really cool feature on top of the ones provided by those other phones by actually stitching moving objects together, aided by the new color spectrum analyzer sensor, and creates light trails as seen in professional photos.
With all that said, you may be wondering about the auto mode as well, which is even better than previous auto modes we’ve seen from LG. Utilizing the large 1/2.6″ 16MP sensor and the new f/1.8 lens, more light and detail is captured than ever before. This is evident in the night time shots LG has provided from the Vegas strip, where the auto mode captures a stunning amount of detail, while the denoise filter does a great job of marking down noisy RGB elements on the sensor without destroying detail. You can view this one side by side with the light trail version of the same photo to see how much more detail the light trail mode can pull in thanks to its wizardry, as well as the sheer amount of detail pulled out in the rest of the shots. It’s great to see manufacturers finally moving away from the heavy-handed denoise filters we’ve seen over the past few years in smartphones which created an almost watercolor-like image when zoomed in and eliminated much of the detail the sensor produced. Stay tuned for our own samples to see just how true the real-world performance of the G4 is!