LG Shine KE970 Review - Imaging
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Richard Baguley Published on April 25, 2007 Comment on this |
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The LG Shine KE970 comes with a built-in 2 megapixel camera, with the lens on the back side of the camera body. But it’s nothing to write home about; the images lack resolution, have weak color and get rather noisy when the light level falls. It’s better than not having a camera at all, but the KE970’s camera isn’t going to win any prizes for technical excellence.
Resolution (2.09)
Color (3.41)
Noise (1.32)
We measure noise by taking images at a variety of light levels, from 3000 lux (roughly equivalent to a birth, sunny day) to 60 lux (about what you’d get in darkened room with a single light bulb). We then use Imatest to analyze the amount of noise in each image, and produce a score based on the amount of noise. The LG Shine KE970 had a pretty average score in this test; the images quickly succumbed to noise as the light level fell. But we typically expect this; cell phone cameras have small image sensors that are more prone to noise than the larger ones in most digital cameras, and the images from the KE970 are no more prone to noise than the images we’ve seen from other cell phone cameras.
Live Preview (7.0)
The KE970 uses the entire resolution of the screen for previewing the images before they are captured, and this preview is nice and detailed. However, it is rather jerky; if you pan the camera, it quickly breaks down into a blurry mess until the camera is still again. There are a few icons around the edge of the screen that present you with details of the camera settings, such as the autofocus settings, the resolution, how full the memory or storage card is and how much battery power is left. Unlocked Standby to First Shot (2.82)
The KE970 took a disappointing 7.1 seconds to go from the standby state (with the cover closed) to taking a photograph. This is way too long, and part of this is the fact that you have to go into the on-screen menu to start the camera off; you can’t just press the shutter button. This adds a couple of seconds to the process (even with practice), which could mean missing a great candid shot.
Shot to Shot Time (6.9)
The KE790 can take either single shots, a group of three or six shots from every pres of the shutter. In the latter case, it took six shots in 2.6 seconds, a rate of 2.3 frames per second. That’s pretty good for a cell phone camera, but it is worth noting that theis reduces the maximum size of the captured images to 640 by 480 pixels. A burst of 6 images in just over 2 seconds may not be enough to capture a full football pay, but it’s a lot better than most we’ve seen, such as the Krazr K1m, which took an appalling 21.8 seconds to capture 5 images.
Shutter to Shot Time (2.5)
The KE970 wasn’t so speedy when it comes to taking individual shots, though; we measured the time between pressing the shutter and the cell phone capturing the image at a rather tardy 0.8 seconds. Much of this delay seems to be the fault of the auto focus, which seems to take about half a second to focus in. This might seem to contradict the shot to shot time result above, but the KE970 doesn’t focus between shots. So, it focuses once, then takes 6 images at the same focus point.
Interface (5.5) The camera on the KE970 has a variety of options, so it’s important that the user can easily control these options. It only partly succeeds in this: although the tabbed interface of the options menu doesn’t present you with too many choices, you have to use the extremely small buttons on either side of the scroll wheel to choose the option you want, which is a real pain. This process is also not well described in the manual.
Photo Album Software Internal (4.0)
The internal photo album of the KE 970 is extremely basic; you can scroll through thumbnails of the images and videos, show individual images and se a basic slideshow of the images. And that’s about it; the only other options are to set the image as the menu wallpaper, move or copy the image and print via Bluetooth. There are no options for editing images or creating more complex slideshows.
Manual Control (2.0)
Although the KE970 does provide a good selection of options for the camera, there are no true manual controls; you can’t set the shutter or aperture speed directly. The closest thing to a manual control is the presets for the white balance.
Zoom (1.0)
A 2x digital zoom is the only zoom present, and this should only be used in an emergency; it works by enlarging the center of the image, and has a serious adverse effect on the image qualiy. Given the thin profile of the KE970, the lack of an optical zoom isn’t surprising; only thicker cell phones like the Nokia N95 have optical zooms built in.
Focus (5.0)
The KE970 is unusual in having an auto focus lens: most cell phone cameras rely on a fixed focus lens. This is a good thing in some ways (for one, it provides a macro mode for shooting close ups), but not in others; as we noted above, the autofocus mechanism takes about half a second to focus in (a process that is shown by a red rectangle on the screen), which could lead to lost shots. We were not able to determine the full range of the auto focus, but it was able to focus down to a couple of centimeters away from the lens. We did notice, though, that the KE970 would show that it was in focus (with the green rectangle on the scree) even if an object was too close to focus.
Flash (3.0)
The KE970 uses an LED, not a real flash. If you put the camera into flash mode, this rather bright LED is constantly illuminated, which means that it’s going to be more irritating than useful; you’ll get photos of people squinting at the camera and complaining about how you are blinding them rather than them smiling.
Metering (4.0)
The KE970 is also unusual in offering a couple of metering modes; a centered and combined (overall average) mode. Most cell phone cameras only offer a average mode, so this could be useful if you are trying to photograph someone against the sun.
White Balance (5.0)
As well as the auto white balance mode, 5 presets are available: night mode, florescent, cloudy, incandescent and daylight.
Image Handling (0.0)
For a cell phone with this selection of camera features, the KE790 is very weak when it comes to processing the images; there is no way to resize, crop or otherwise edit the images. LG obviously decided that, if users wanted to edit images, they would do so on a PC or Mac, but it is a pity that there aren’t even basic editing features on offer.
Video
Overall Video Score (2.0)
Don’t expect to throw out your camcorder if you buy a KE970; the video it captures is low in resolution, has jerky motion and has poor color.
Video Resolution (0.58)
The highest resolution that the KE970 can capture video at is 176 by 144, so it’s no surprise that this video is very low in resolution; Imatest produced a lw/ph rating of just 94.5 horizontal and 64.3 vertical. This is low even by the poor standards of cell phone video; other cheaper cell phones can capture much better looking video at higher resolutions and with much more detail.
Video Compression (2.0)
The KE970 has three quality settings (and, believe it or not, our test video was captured at the highest of these), but videos can only be saved in 3GP format; there’s no support for MPEG-4 video.
Interface (7.0) The camcorder interface of the KE970 looks much like the camera interface, using the full screen for the live preview, with icons around the edge. However, this means that the live preview is of a higher resolution than the captured video, and it has the same problem with the preview becoming a blurry mess when the cell phone is panned. But perhaps that’s just as well, because the captured video is a blurry mess too.
Manual Control (2.0)
The only hint of a manual control here is the white balance mode; all of the other settings are automatic only.
Zoom (1.0)
The same 2x digital zoom that is found on the still imaging side can be used in the video mode, both when previewing and when shooting video.
Editing (0.0)
No options are included for editing videos; the only way to edit the results is to delete them and shoot again.
Modes (2.0) The KE970 has only two video modes; one for shooting MMS video suitable for sending as an MMS message, and one for general video shooting. There are no scene modes or other settings to tweak the way the video is captured
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