lg optimus g pro - AOL.com

DISTRO
03.08.13
LG OPTIMUS G PRO
REVIEW
The G Pro display
features incredibly
natural colors and
great viewing angles,
but it’s a bit difficult
to see in sunlight.
tween the two is not quite so cut-anddry
as the numbers would indicate.
Viewing angles? The G Pro’s got
them... a lot of them. IPS panels are
known for excelling in this arena, and
the Pro is now the official poster child
for that screen tech. If watching movies
or reading books from extreme angles
is your thing (or you just like it when
friends or strangers start peeking at
what you’re watching), it definitely
won’t disappoint. The only display with
superior angles is the S-LCD3 on the
Droid DNA, and it only beats out the
Pro by an extremely slight margin. The
screen takes a hit in direct sunlight,
however, as we had to bump the brightness
up to at least 80 percent in order
to see anything clearly.
Moving on to color saturation. We
viewed the Pro side by side with the
Note II and Droid DNA, and the Pro easily
featured the most natural colors of
the trio; the DNA was typically undersaturated,
while the AMOLED panel on
the Note II unsurprisingly was on the
opposite end of the spectrum.
Now that 1080p is becoming commonplace
in the high-end smartphone
market, is there really any wow factor
involved with the G Pro’s display? Absolutely.
Seeing such rich, crisp text and
smooth lines on this large of a screen is
pretty close to awe-striking. It may not
be packing as many pixels per inch as the
DNA, but it sure comes close enough to
make very little difference for our eyes —
you’re not going to see a single pixel on
either screen, after all. They’re both gorgeous,
and this one just happens to take
advantage of a larger display.
CAMERA
As HTC noted recently, megapixel count
isn’t everything — it is, however, a very
welcome feature as long as you have
solid enough firmware and components
to back it up. We believe that LG has
accomplished this very thing with the
13-megapixel rear camera found on the G
Pro, which has an f/2.4 aperture, 3.92mm
focal length, AF and LED flash. As for
the front, you can expect a 2.1-megapixel
module with 4.6mm focal length.
Before we dive into performance, it’s
worth mentioning that the G Pro has
most of the tweakable settings and features
we love to play with when grabbing
good shots. From the customizable
left sidebar you can fiddle with intelligent
auto, HDR, panorama, white balance,
voice shutter mode, ISO, scenes
and focus modes. A dedicated macro
mode was nowhere to be found, but
most close-ups turn out totally fine on
normal mode, so we won’t dwell too