LG Viewty Smart: A surprisingly good camera phone [Updated]

I have been in the market for about a year trying to find a dedicated point-and-shoot camera that is compact and yet offers adequate manual controls that I need as a photographer.

But at the same time, I have been resisting the idea of toting a separate device, preferring instead to use a camera phone for those quick snapshots. In the past, I’d been served well by first the venerable Sony Ericsson K750i and later a Sony Ericsson W760i; I particularly liked the K750i for its manual controls. Indeed, some of my favorite shots were taken with that phone.

I was left without a good camera after I switched to the iPhone 3G. Into the scene entered the LG Viewty Smart GC900. In the past two weeks, I’ve been using it extensively, putting it through the paces by taking photographs and video clips of just about everything I come across.

Now that the NDA I was bound to has been lifted, and that LG Singapore has officially unveiled this device last week at CommunicAsia 2009, I am free to share with you my overall impressions about the Viewty Smart^*.

My review will be in two parts. In Part One, I’ll talk about the camera aspects of this device, while in Part Two, I’ll offer my thoughts about the Viewty Smart as a phone. I should add a disclaimer: Yes, LG did give me a free unit, but in no ways are the opinions expressed here swayed by that fact.

Update 25.08.09:

An update to the “hot pixels” problem: LG advised that the problem is ostensibly caused by a defective lens on my unit, and has since swapped it with a replacement set.

Unfortunately, the problem exists even in the new set. In casual observation, the number of hot pixels in each and every image taken seems to be even more than those taken with my previous set. Also, the hot pixels now vary in size, in a mix of some large and some small ones. On the previous set, the hot pixels were instead more consistently of the same size.

I’m beginning to strongly suspect that the problem is caused by the sensor more than anything else. I’m awaiting a response from LG, and will update this post again.

First impressions matter

As the successor to last year’s Viewty KU900, the Viewty Smart GC900 is LG’s sophomore effort in its foray into a product line of mobile phones in which the camera is the most defining feature. You can think of the Viewty product line as LG’s equivalent of Sony Ericsson’s Cyber-shot class of camera phones (‘C’ series, previously designated as ‘K’).

Perhaps the biggest initial reaction I had to the Viewty Smart was the surprise that it came from a name I don’t immediately associate “good camera phones” with. I confess my initial reaction at being invited to test an LG camera phone had been one of skepticism.

But now I am glad to tell you that the Viewty Smart has rekindled the joy of shooting with a camera phone for me; it is that strong an offering by LG. Coming from someone who has never before considered any camera phone not made by Sony Ericsson―the only folks who I personally feel take their cameras seriously―that is high praise enough.

What’s on the platter

I am using what I’ve been told is a “near-production” unit, and that hardware specs are all but final, so I don’t expect any changes to them between now and when this camera phone becomes available on the market.

The main photo and video features are:

• 8-megapixel camera, with light sensitivity up to ISO 1600
• Schneider-Kreuznach autofocus lens, f/2.8
• 4X Digital Zoom
• LED Flash
• Intelligent Shot Mode: This is a key feature of the Viewty Smart. Intelligent Shot Mode automatically analyzes a scene and decides if it should shoot in Portrait, Portrait Landscape, Portrait Backlight, Portrait Night, Night, Landscape, or Backlight mode.

• Multi Face Detection: Automatically detects and focuses on up to three persons’ faces.

• 3” touchscreen, 16 million colors, capable of displaying 480 x 800 (WVGA)
• Camera-style UI with Quick Keys
• Various Shot Modes: Beauty Shot, Art Shot, Smile Shot, Panorama Shot, Continuous Shot

• Geo-Tagging
• Video recording, 720×480 (D1) at 30 fps, 320×240 (QVGA) slow-motion at 120 fps or fast-motion at 5 fps
• 1.5 GB internal memory, expandable to 32 GB via MicroSD
• Improved Photo Editing: Fog Drawing, Raindrop Effect, ID Photo, Morphing & Freestyle Warping

Excuse me, is that your camera ringing?

Using the Viewty Smart for the first time on a photo walk, the immediate impression I got was that I was holding a compact point-and-shoot digital camera, its form factor akin to, say, a Casio Exilim, rather than a camera phone, which is exactly the way LG wants you to feel about the Viewty Smart ― as a camera first and a mobile phone second.

To that end, LG has succeeded; from its form factor to the UI design of the software that compliments its camera, you get the sense that this product was built around a user’s need to take photographs with it more than anything else.

Evidently, a lot of effort has been put into making this a camera phone that means business, when the camera isn’t just an afterthought the way it is for some other phones (*cough* iPhone 3G…).

But this is where it gets ironic: LG, in knowing it is not yet a name consumers associate with serious camera phones, and is working actively (I hope) to change that perception, may have achieved a triumph in the camera department at the expense of the phone aspects of the Viewty Smart — more on that in Part Two.

No, you can’t have the kitchen sink too

Despite LG’s marketing angle for the Viewty Smart, I feel it’s important for potential buyers to remember that, at the end of the day, the Viewty Smart is still just a camera phone. Where technology currently stands, there are things that you simply cannot get out of a camera phone: you’re not going to get a larger sensor, you’re not going to be rid of shutter lag, and you’re most certainly not going to get optical zoom.

Any one who expects the Viewty Smart to have all the bells and whistles in a point-and-shoot digital camera is: 1) barking up the wrong tree to begin with; 2) looking in the wrong place for a solution irrelevant to the problem, and; 3) going to be disappointed. But if he or she has reasonable expectations of what a camera phone can and cannot do, I feel that the Viewty Smart is, for all intents and purposes, already an overachiever as a camera phone.

The good

As with any camera I first lay my hands on, I took with the Viewty Smart a wide variety of shots in myriad lighting conditions to find its strengths and weaknesses. Being a photographer, I like to know exactly the technical boundaries of a camera so that I can maximize its potential to the fullest while working around its limitations at the same time.

For those of you who know me in real life, you wil know that I’m the kind of guy who wouldn’t bother with gimmicky, “fun” features in a device that are clearly targeted for the masses, so you definitely won’t be reading about the fun stuff in the Viewty Smart such as Fog Drawing, Morphing, or even Smile Shot, because I really can’t care less for them.

What I do care about in a device are ease of operation, sensitivity in design and ergonomics, and clarity in the way features are implemented.

Here’s what I like about the Viewty Smart by the second day of using it:

Large 3” WVGA screen

At 800 x 480, the screen is crisp, clear and bright even under direct sunlight.

Good color rendition

This is the one aspect of the Viewty Smart that I am the most impressed with. I’ve seen enough camera phones failing so miserably in this department I no longer have much faith left that manufacturers can get this right (*cough* Nokia…).

Automatic white balancing in the Viewty Smart is surprisingly good even in mixed lighting, which should be the acid test for any camera. Colors rendered are pleasant and accurate, on par with―if not better than―what I can get with any model in Sony Ericsson’s ‘C’ series.

And I should add that photographs taken with the Viewty Smart are “punchy” compared to those taken with my current phone, the iPhone 3G, which I find has a tendency to be very conservative in its exposures, resulting in drab, washed-out photographs.

Here are some shots I took with the Viewty Smart.

Manual exposure

Manual exposure was the first thing I looked for when I took the Viewty Smart out of the box. Being able to manually set EV is a must for me; for the type of photographs I’m inclined to take, I rarely accept what a camera automatically reads for me. EV can be adjusted four steps in either direction, from -2 to +2.

Manual focusing

The Viewty Smart lets me set focusing distance manually through an on-screen slider, similar to how EV is adjusted. While I’d much prefer if there is touch AF—when I can set a focus point anywhere within a scene simply by tapping on the screen (*cough* iPhone 3G S *cough* Samsung Pixon12), the inclusion of manual focusing remains a nice surprise.

Form factor, size and weight

This is a matter of personal taste, but I like the form factor and overall build quality of this device. Design-wise, the Viewty Smart is a departure from its boxy, chunky predecessor. And being extremely slimand light—at 12.4mm thick and weighing only 102 grams—means this is a camera I will take with me anywhere. If there is one side effect to the slimness and lightness, it is that I find myself losing grip of the Viewty Smart every once in a while when I am trying to operate it with only one hand.

D1 video, 720×480 at 30 fps

As a director who often needs to shoot video during location recces, it is great that I can now do that with my Viewty Smart instead of having to use my Sony Handycam. Video is recorded at D1 resolution, no less! The video geek in me smiled at this one when I read the spec sheet for the first time on the same day I received my unit.

Floating Image Gallery

Having being spoilt silly by the elegance and responsiveness of the iPhone OS, I may have much to pick about the S-Class User Interface that drives all of LG’s latest mobile phones (again, more on that in Part Two), but the Gallery an example of where it is occasionally shines.

What I especially like about the Gallery is that, when viewing it in landscape mode, I can jump to images grouped according to event date by flicking up or down. This is heaps better than the one big pile of images iPhone’s Camera Roll throws at you.

The bad

As much as the immediate out-of-the-box experience with the Viewty Smart is pleasant, there are some nagging flaws, most of which concern the image quality of the images it produces.

Now, I’m not pixel-peeping here; these are some bad defects. Image fidelity should always be the top priority even if a product is meant to be only consumer level. For a product that LG is positioning as its flagship image-capturing device, it is unthinkable that these problems are allowed to remain in production units.

In the feedback session that the ten of us participating in the campaign had with a handful of LG folks from the head office, I raised the following issues:

Over-aggressive noise reduction

The tell-tale sign of overzealous noise reduction is how watercolor-like an image is when viewed in full size; details are lost, looking instead like blobs. I was surprised to find lost details even in images taken in bright daylight at ISO 100—the lowest ISO the Viewty Smart does. I really hope LG will address this issue in a future firmware update by having the camera apply a different level of noise reduction for each ISO level, or at the very least, allow a user to turn noise reduction off.

Excessive noise at ISO 1600

As I’d suspected, ISO 1600 yields very noisy images. I wish camera phone manufacturers will stop this nonsense about megapixel count.

Imagine the image sensor as a room designed to physically hold ten persons comfortably. Now imagine fifty people in there. Not only does the quality of the air (image quality) drops, but you’re going to get fifty souls complaining loudly (image noise). The only solution is to move everyone to a bigger room

So, until the image sensor in a camera phone actually gets physically larger, stuffing more megapixels into that Chiclet-sized sensor will only result in more noise. Which manufacturers will, naturally, attempt to overcome by cranking up noise reduction. Which brings us back to Point #1. Which becomes a vicious cycle.

AF hunts excessively in Macro Mode

The camera has some difficulties locking focus on subjects when in macro mode; it will hunt, its lens whirring back and forth, before giving up and take a shot any way, even if the subject is completely out of focus. In my informal tests, this problem seems to be contained within macro operations; the camera locks AF fine for far-distance subjects.

Lanyard loop is in the wrong place

I was surprised to be the only one who raised this point, which elicited a collective sigh from the Koreans. After explaining my case, they admitted it was an issue they had grappled with, citing the final decision as a compromise due to the duality of the Viewty Smart as both a portrait- and a landscape-oriented device.

But it still doesn’t make any sense at all to me. The lanyard loop on the Viewty Smart is in the top left corner when you hold it in portrait mode with the screen to you). So, if you were to hang the device off of a neck strap and lift it up to your face, it is all but guaranteed you’d be looking at the Viewty Smart upside down unless you twist it around, a gesture that is awkward and unnecessary.

It makes even less sense when you use the Viewty Smart in camera mode. Most cameras are designed for right-handed operation. Accordingly, its wrist strap or lanyard should loop over the user’s right hand. But when you hold the Viewty Smart horizontally like a camera, the lanyard is tethered to the lower left corner of the device when it really should be in the lower right-hand corner.

From a design standpoint, it makes me wonder how this even got past a usability test. You may think that I’m being anal here, but it is getting little things like this right that adds to the user experience of a product.

Problems with EXIF metadata

All the images taken with my Viewty Smart were stamped with the capture date & time as “01-01-1970, 00:00AM”. Also, the camera stamps the word “VIEWTY2″ as the image description in the EXIF data of every image. That’s annoying, because Flickr parses this line and makes it the caption of the photo.

I give the engineers at LG the benefit of a doubt that this is due to the beta nature of the firmware in my unit. But if this goes out the door unrectified, users are going to howl when they attempt to sort their photographs.

Update 25.08.09:

This has been rectified in firmware version GC900AT_V10d.

Shutter button feels too spongy

Like most cameras, the Shutter button on the Viewty Smart triggers AF when it is half-pressed. But the build quality of this button is poor; it isn’t all that sensitive, and there is too much freeplay to it.

This is especially obvious when I press the Shutter button to get into Camera mode. This should be much easier.

The ugly

LG, if you are reading this, this is where the fun ends, unfortunately. In that same meeting, I was unequivocal in stressing that LG should do something about the one showstopping problem that all of our “near-production” units exhibited.

The first time I transferred images taken with the Viewty Smart to my desktop, I was horrified to find hot pixels―pixels that appear as pure white―in each and every one of them, scattered at random across each and every image. The hot pixels appeared regardless of the lighting conditions each image was captured in. There were easily more than 50 hot pixels I had to clone for each shot.

This is an issue I consider to be very serious to not just myself, but also to any one who, in buying the Viewty Smart as a replacement for his or her compact camera, will be as frustrated and disappointed when they see their precious shots in full size.

I’ve been told there is a firmware update that should address this problem, so I remain hopeful that this is a software issue and not a flaw in the hardware itself, which, if it turns out to be, would almost certainly throw a wrench into LG’s plans for a Q3 2009 release.

While I cannot speak for LG in how ambitious its plans are in becoming a notable camera phone maker, letting this problem slide may hurt whatever credibility LG is striving to build, and it may potentially result in a spate of returned units once this goes out into the wild.

“Louis, I think this is the beginning of…”

But in holding good faith that LG will take corrective measures for the image quality issues that all of us ten bloggers unanimously identified, I will still say that the LG Viewty Smart GC900 will please a lot of shutterbugs. The overall polish of this device, from the UI of the camera to its feature set, makes it a surprisingly good camera phone.

Serious photographers can look elsewhere. The Viewty Smart definitely will not be replacing your Sigma DP2 or Canon PowerShot G10, products it isn’t intended to compete with in the first place, and you’d be a fool to think it can. While it won’t make me give up on the idea of getting a dedicated point-and-shoot camera, the Viewty Smart has enough features in one convenient package that I am happy enough to stick with it and continue to use as my walkabout camera for now, while I await a fix to come.

LG’s intention is to make the Viewty Smart compelling enough a replacement for your compact point-and-shoot camera, and it might do just that for some. But—and this is a strong “but”—only if LG irons out the shortcomings regarding image quality. They have a potential winner in this product, but how successful it will be depends on how demanding the good folks there want to be in pursuing excellence in image quality.

^{* Head over to William Tan’s blog for a wealth of photos he’d taken of the Viewty Smart. You can also read Chester Tan’s review here, and Wilfrid Wong’s review here. You can also read LG’s press release of the Viewty Smart here, and visit the Viewty Smart microsite.}