Features or gimmicks?
1) A night-photo setting where you have to keep the camera (and the subject(s)!) stationary for 8 seconds.
2) 960fps slo-mo filming at 720p.
Are those really useful features, or just gimmicks that'll be used once or twice and then forgotten about?
Equally: a 3x optical zoom feature on a dedicated 8MP lens. Is this really needed? You'd be able to get nearly the same level of "optical" zoom by cropping the 40MP image, as Nokia did with the Lumia 1020[*]
It does feel like phone "innovations" are increasingly shallow, and driven by marketing rather than actual technological developments.
That said, I did just pick up an LG V30, precisely because it has an 120-degree ultra-wide lens. And this weekend, I was in London indulging in two of my preferred vices - drinking beer in obscure pubs and hunting down interesting street art.
So, lots of photos. And while I haven't done a scientific comparison, a rough breakdown would be:
* 60% with the 16mp main camera on the V30
* 30% with the 13mp 120mm lens on the V30
* 5% with the Nikon at 1x zoom - it has a slightly wider FoV than the 16mp main camera on the V30
* 5% with the Nikon at a higher zoom level
So yeah, in an urban/social-drinking setting, the wide angle lens was definitely more useful than optical zoom. In fact, I'm mildly surprised that other phone companies haven't gone down the ultra-wide route, especially for the "selfie" front camera!
[*] a quick beer-mat calculation indicates you're going from ~8000x6000 to 3200x2400, so it'd be the equivalent of ~2.5x zoom. And yes, I know the two lenses have differing f-stops, and there's other factors such as bokeh, etc. But it still feels like an overly expensive solution looking for a problem...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
