LG Pop GD510 review

The 3-megapixel camera included on the LG POP is another steady rather than exceptional feature. It lacks a flash, so isn't much use in dark environments, while it has a fixed focus rather than an autofocus system, limiting its shooting flexibility.

The onscreen user interface on the full screen viewfinder is neat and easy to operate, with a well-balanced selection of icons providing an uncluttered menu, big clearly labelled buttons to select options, and a useful info key for when you get lost.

The camera has a fairly conventional set of settings options for this grade of cameraphone – brightness control, several colour effects, white balance, image quality, self timer, multiple shots and so on.

The camera boots up in an average 2-3 seconds with the press of the side button, and after shooting it takes a couple of seconds before you can fire off another shot. Image quality is reasonably good for this sort of camera – colour rendition is well handled but detail is limited and you can't get precision focusing on individual subjects in shots.

Exposure control works quite well mostly, and the auto-metering system seems to react swiftly. Results are above average for a fixed focus 3-megapixel cameraphone, without being remarkable.

The LG POP's photo viewing function is tidy, enabling you to get a full screen scrollable landscape view of thumbnails or to smoothly swipe through a set of images with timeline slider. It's easy too to select multiple images to send via Bluetooth or other messaging options (up to 20 at a time can be sent via Bluetooth).

Slip an onscreen slider down and you can capture video. Some LG touchscreens are among the best video cameraphones, but not the LG POP. It captures footage at maximum QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) resolution, shooting at up to 12 frames per second, so its footage is stilted and generally disappointing. Still, you can upload clips straight to YouTube from the Send options, should quality not be an issue.

The 3-megapixel camera isn't one of LG's high powered shooters. You can take acceptable snaps, but detail is limited. Colour balance is handled well, though and rendered naturally.

The camera does well at defining colours and maintaining good automatic colour and exposure levels, and for this grade of cameraphone it offers some precision and subtlety in rendering tones.

The fixed focus camera means you can't choose what part of a subject to focus on in the same way as you can with an autofocus equipped camera.

Here the camera's auto-metering system adjusts exposure to lighten first the background and then the foreground, although there is some burning out of the brighter portions of the shot in the latter image.

With night shot on, we found images darker images improved slightly but without ambient lighting, the lack of flash meant shots in dark places were poor and noisy.