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Just as you won't buy the LG Optimus GT540 primarily for its Web capabilities, you won't be choosing it primarily for its camera either, although in general we found photos to be reasonably good.
Before we go into how well the camera performs, it is worth noting that you need an SD card in order to use both the camera and video recorder – and none is provided with the device.
The camera's maximum pixel shooting capability is 3MP for stills and 640x480 for video, and put it very firmly towards the bottom of the range. But there are some interesting and useful user tweaks.
Beauty shot, smile shot, blink detection and panorama modes are present, and you can set the ISO to 100, 200, 400 or automatic. You can geotag photos, and can alter the white balance. There is no macro mode, though, nor flash.
However there is the option for automatic Face Tagging - take a snap of a buddy and theoretically if you take another picture of them the LG Optimus GT540 will recognise and tag them accordingly.
In practice this only works if you take the picture head on - meaning you're rarely going to get the face tags you so desperately want.
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The camera is not big on capturing finer detail, but it produced reasonable snaps. Just don't zoom in too far on the PC or Mac if you want to avoid seeing your images pixellate.
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There's plenty of capability for taking general tourist type photos, which are good enough to share over the Internet. Colour reproduction is pretty accurate too, although shots do tend towards the pallid.
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There was plenty of overhead lighting when we took this photo, and so it is passable – although not great. If we'd had to rely on the flash we'd have been stumped, as the camera does not have one.
