LG Dare Cell Phone Review - Imaging

The 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera took very good shots, with the weakest point being some issues with color accuracy. Video capture was also very good and there's even slow motion video available.

Resolution (6.96)
To test resolution we take photos of an industry standard Applied Image 12233 resolution chart. We then run these photos through Imatest software, which produces a score called line widths per picture heigh (lw/ph). This is a measure of how many alternating black and white lines can be discerned before they start blurring together.

The LG Dare and its 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera did reasonably well in our test scoring 1251 lw/ph horizontal and 709 lw/ph horizontal. You can see below that this is the best performance amongst our comparison phones in this test. It's also far above the average phone camera, although not quite up to the standard of our best performers like the Nokia N82.

Cell Phone	LG Dare	Samsung Glyde	Samsung Instinct
Score	6.96	4.04	1.40
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	1251/709	954/960	562/623
Image of Resolution Chart

Cell Phone	LG Voyager	Palm Centro	Apple iPhone
Score	2.93	1.41	4.18
lw/ph horizontal/vertical	837.9/838.9	581/596	970/879
Image of Resolution Chart

Color (3.77)
To test the quality of colors produced by the LG Dare's camera we took photos of the industry standard GretagMacbeth color chart and ran the photos through Imatest software to analyze them. Imatest produces the chart below, which compares the 24 original colors on the color chart to the colors produced by the Dare.

Imatest also produces the following chart, where you can get a more visual idea of how accurate colors are. In this chart the square is the ideal color and the circle is the captured color. The longer the line between the two the more innacurate the colors.

You can see that the LG Dare's camera had some issues as almost all colors were slightly off. That said it's not terrible performance and the whites in particular were pretty accurate, which we like to see. You can see below that the Dare's performance in this test was right in the middle of our comparison phones. Overall it falls a bit below average for color fidelity.

Cell Phone	LG Dare	Samsung Glyde	Samsung Instinct
Score	3.77	2.32	1.67
Color Checker Chart

Cell Phone	LG Voyager	Palm Centro	Apple iPhone
Score	5.31	8.08	5.22
Color Checker Chart

Noise (1.47)
To test noise we take photos of the GretagMacbeth color chart at four different lighting levels ranging from very bright to about candlelight. We run these photos through Imatest to analyze noise at each lighting level. We consider both overal noise and consistency across lighting levels in our final score. The LG Dare performed better than average in this test with very consistent and reasonably low noise across lighting levels, at least for a cell phone. The truth is that even the best cell phone cameras produce a lot of noise, which is why there isn't a single score below over 2.0.

Noise

Live Preview (7.0)
The LG Dare's live preview takes up the entire three inch display, which is what we like to see. Colors on the screen were very accurate to what we got in the final shot, but we did notice a lot of blurring when we panned the camera, which may make it difficult to take a photo of a moving target or quickly shift your perspective and take a shot. Details was good, however, everything on screen looked sharp.

Unlocked Standby to First Shot (6.90)
The LG Dare took 2.9 seconds to go from the home screen until we had captured a photo. This is actually pretty impressive for an auto-focus camera, you can see below that the Samsung Glyde and LG Voyager, both of which also have auto-focus lenses, took significantly longer. We were very pleased with the LG Dare's performance on this test, this kind of speed in an auto-focus camera is exceedingly rare. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Unlocked Standbye to First Shot (sec)

Shot to Shot Time (9.0)
The LG Dare was able to take a series of six shots in almost exactly two seconds using its burst mode. This works out to three frames per second (fps). This is excellent performance, but like many cameras it comes at a price. The resolution of the photos is dropped significantly. The saving grace is that the "dropped" resolution on the Dare is 1.3 megapixels, which is as high as many cell phones take a maximum resolution. This means the photos will still be somewhat usable. The excellent performance in this test means that you'll be able to capture pretty good action shots, where shot to shot time becomes most important. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Shot to Shot Time (fps)

Shutter to Shot Time (1.25)
The LG Dare took 1.6 seconds to capture a photo once we had pressed down on the shutter key. This is pretty slow, but is to be expected from an auto-focus camera that needs to put the scene into focus before capturing the photo. If you expect you might need speedier performance you can turn off the auto-focus. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Shutter to Shot Time (sec)

Interface (8.5)
The LG Dare is very good. The screen is blank when you first launch the camera aside from a helpful reminder to tap the screen if you want to access controls and a couple of indicators at the top of the screen. Tapping the screen will bring up controls on the top, left and right of the display. At the top is a bar for zoom, you can also control zoom with the volume keys. On the left is another slider for brightness control and just below that a button that takes you to more in depth menus. On the right are five controls for the Home screen, Auto-Focus, Timer, Flash and a shortcut to the Album software.

Tapping on the menu button brings up a series of icons on the bottom of the screen. These act as tabs, so tapping on one will bring up a menu just above it, very similar to the interface we see on some HTC phones. We like this interface for two reasons, even when accessing menus you get to see what's on screen as almost everything is transparent. The interface is also very camera-like. We found that the Dare's interface gave you quick access to many important functions and had a plethora of other controls available in a well organized menu system.

Photo Album Software Internal (6.0)
The LG Dare's album software takes you to a simple thumbnail grid 3 x 4, with the bottom row slightly cut off. Tapping on a picture will take you to the full screen version and rotating the phone will let you view the photo in landscape orientation automatically, similar to the iPhone. At the bottom of the screen is a menu button that will let you select multiple photos to move, delete or send. There's also a play button to play a simple slideshow. Unlike the camera there's very little fancy here, it's what we would expect to see from a standard cell phone.

Manual Control (3.0)
The LG Dare offers a couple of manual controls. There are scene modes for panorama, portrait, landscape, night and beach and a face detection feature, which is very rare on cell phones.

Zoom (1.0)
The LG Dare offers a 2x optical zoom. Optical zoom just crops and enlarges the scene and is not worth much, thus we only award a single point for it.

Focus (5.0)
The LG Dare has an auto-focus camera, which takes the time to make sure that you're scene is in focus before you take a shot. This generally produces much better photos than the fixed focus cameras you find on most cell phones.

Flash (3.0)
The LG Dare has an LED flash that is good out to about a meter.

Metering (6.0)
The LG Dare offers brightness controls, ISO up to 400 and a choice of average and spot metering. This is the best selection of options for controlling how light is judged in your scene that we've seen on a cell phone to date. It's still nowhere near as good as a real digital camera, however.

White Balance (0.0)
The LG Dare has the typical set of white balance presets that you see on most cell phone cameras.

Image Handling (7.0)
The LG Dare has very good image handling options. When you choose to edit a photo your choices include drawing on it, adjusting contrast, sharpness blur and brightness, cropping, rotating and adding some fun effects. This is not quite up to the range of options you see from S60 devices from Nokia, but is far better than what most cell phones offer.

Video Quality (8.0)
The quality of video captured by the LG Dare is very good, significantly better than your average cell phone, but not quite up to the standards of the Nokia N95 and N82. It captures 640 x 480 video at 15 fps, half the frame rate of those other two phones. Most users will be quite pleaesd by the results, colors were accurate and the video was sharp, even when blown up to twice its size on the screen. It's certainly Youtube worthy and can be watched on a monitor full screen without too much worry. We wouldn't want to show it on a high def tv, however. We should also mention that the Dare can capture video at 120 fps, but only at 320 x 240. The result of this is that you get slow motion video. Although it can be some fun, the quality of the video captured did not impress us, and it's certainly not something you can show off on anything larger than a small cell phone screen. Still, it's a nice extra to have.

Video Resolution (12.26)
The LG Dare did very well in our test of video resolution. For this test we take video of the same industry standard resolution chart we use in our stills resolution test. We then run frames from this video through Imatest to produce a line widths per picture height score, which tells us how many alternating black and white lines can be discerned before they start blurring together. The LG Dare put up the best score by far amongst our comparison phones, and there's a couple of phones in there that aren't too shabby.

Video Compression (2.0)
The LG Dare captures video in 3GP format only. This is a shame as we would have loved to see Mpeg-4 or H264 capture as well.

Interface (8.5)
The camcorder interface is very similar to the camera interface. The screen is blank except for a couple of indicators at the top of the screen. Tap the screen to get zoom controls at the top, brightness and menu button to the left and time, speed, flash and album buttons on the right. Hitting the menu button will bring up a selection of controls at the bottom of the screen with associated menus. The biggest difference is that there are just fewer menu items for the camcorder. We still very much like the layout of the interface.

Manual Control (0.0)
The LG Dare does not offer any manual controls for video playback.

Zoom (1.0)
As with still pictures you have a 2x digital zoom available for video capture. Once again digital zoom is not worth much so we only award a single point for it.

Editing (0.0)
There are no video editing features on the Dare.

Modes (3.0)
The LG Dare offers a time limited mode to record video to send via MMS. It also offers white balance controls.

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