Last week we looked back at the first quad camera phone, well, quad camera if you just look at the back. The addition of the selfie camera brings the total to five. But the Galaxy A9 (2018) wasn’t the first phone to have five cameras on board – the LG V40 ThinQ beat it by a few weeks.
The late 2018 V Series flagship is the topic of today’s Flashback. We’ll talk about its cameras, its other great features, some less great features, and a troubled launch.
The V40 was officially announced on September 27, but that announcement was a little short on details. The full disclosure took place a few days later, on October 3. The phone became available soon after (Oct.16), although some regions had to wait longer (for example, the Indian launch didn’t happen until the end of January of the following year).
But even before the official launch there were problems: the renders showed that LG was about to commit the sin of adopting a display with notches, ruining the clean look that people appreciated with the V30.
And it was a pretty wide notch too, but it had a reason: it housed two cameras (in addition to the headset). Those were an 8MP module with an 80 ° FoV and a wider 5MP camera with a 90 ° FoV. How much difference does 10 degrees make? Well, here are some comparison shots:
Examples of selfies: Normal • Wide angle
As you can probably tell, the image quality was far from perfect. This is a downside considering there are two not-so-good cameras that are carved into the display.
LG was one of the first pioneers in multi-camera setups, but the V40 was the first to assemble the trinity: wide angle, ultra wide angle and telephoto. This allowed users to photograph groups of people and individuals, take close-up photos, and shoot distant subjects.
The main module was well equipped, had a 12 MP (1 / 2.6 ”) sensor with 1.4 µm pixels and Dual Pixel autofocus, as well as a 78 ° lens with an extraordinarily bright f / 1.5 aperture and OIS. For a 2018 release, these are some excellent specs on paper.
And the phone put it to good use. Daytime shooting was good, albeit nothing special. The color rendition was nice and the shots overall were nice, but the dynamic range left something to be desired and the shots weren’t the sharpest we’ve seen.
Camera samples, main camera
However, the relatively large pixels, large aperture and optical stabilization turned out to be truly exceptional in the dark. The photos hold up quite well:
Low-light samples, main camera
The ultra wide-angle camera wasn’t that impressive, but still good. It was equipped with a 16 MP 1 / 3.1 ”sensor (1.0 µm pixels) and a fixed focus lens. Night performance was also solid. The camera wasn’t that wide at 107 ° (for comparison, the LG G5 brought a really wide 135 ° lens in early 2016), on the plus side it showed very little distortion.
Camera samples, ultra wide angle camera
Low light samples, ultra wide angle camera
The latest member of the trio was the telephoto module. The 52mm lens offered 2x optical magnification (45 ° FoV) and had a 12MP (1 / 3.4 “, 1.0µm pixel) sensor. It was a solid first effort by LG – previous models contained a wide + ultra wide configuration – and it was competitive with contemporary offerings from Samsung and Apple. It simply wasn’t usable in the dark, so the phone switched to upscaling images from the main camera.
Samples of cameras, telephoto
Returning to the main camera for a moment, it recorded superb 4K video. Somehow the 60fps clips were sharper than the 30fps ones, but we wouldn’t complain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries
This may be subjective, but LG has managed to design a good-looking triple camera, laid out horizontally on a modest bump, with an LED flash on the side and a fingerprint reader underneath.
The front, well, that was an acquired taste. The phone packed a 6.4-inch P-OLED display, so it was pretty good at hiding the notch by merging it into the status bar. But you knew it was there and it bothered some people.
On the plus side, it was a flat screen with good features. It was sharp at a resolution of 1,440 x 3,120 px (537 ppi) and supported HDR10. The color accuracy was not perfect, but the brightness was quite high.
There was always functionality on the full display, something that was introduced with the LG V30, after the V10 and V20 tried to use only a thin strip as the always-on portion.
Always on display
The sleek appearance of the LG V40 ThinQ was far from the utilitarian design of the series progenitor, the LG V10, but the phone still passed several MIL-STD-810G tests, had an aluminum frame, was equipped with Gorilla Glass protection. 5 on the front and back and an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance.
When we first handled the phone we were surprised at how light it was and it wasn’t an illusion, it tipped the scales at just 168g. The Galaxy S9 + and Huawei Mate 20 Pro, two competitors from the same period, both weighed 189g.
This was partly due to the small battery – the 3,300mAh capacity wasn’t much to go on. Predictably, the phone posted a disappointing endurance rating of just 64 hours, about 20 hours shorter than some competitors.
Using the supplied 18W charger took 1 hour and 53 minutes to fully charge. It wasn’t bad for the day, the bad thing was you had to do it more often than with other flagships.
On the plus side, LG knew what its fans liked and kept the Quad DAC for the 3.5mm jack, which resulted in loud, high-quality audio piping in a pair of wired headphones.
The LG V20 was the first to launch with Android 7.0 Nougat (just two months after Google rolled out the new version), the V40 wasn’t that fast. It launched with Android 8.1 Oreo a few months after 9.0 Pie became official. It got Pie in June and later Android 10, but 11 wasn’t in the cards.
Either way, the V40 was powered by the Snapdragon 845, the chipset of choice for a 2018 flagship Android. It was paired with 6GB of RAM and 64 or 128GB of storage (expandable via a microSD slot).
The LG V40 ThinQ wasn’t a perfect phone. The short battery life was its biggest flaw and it could have been done with some display calibration. Even a couple of better selfie cameras. It was still a really interesting flagship and LG had pinned its hopes on a good sale.
With a new director of mobile communications in office, the company was changing its approach to the market and its research and development efforts. Unfortunately, things did not go well: LG as a whole posted record profits, while the mobile division lost money in 2018. The first quarter of 2019 also brought a loss and eyes had already turned to the V50 ThinQ. . The problems continued into 2020.
That’s how it went with LG’s mobile endeavors. She created some of the most interesting phones, but they were mainly a curiosity that few people have bought. Since closing the mobile division at a loss of money, the company has been posting impressive results, but we know many of you are still missing the bizarre LG phones. Sometimes we do too.
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