LG V30 First Look: The Creator’s Phone?
With last year’s G5 being aimed a bit more at the mid-market and going with the concept of mods the V20 launched about 6 months later became the go to LG phone for the higher-end audience last year.
LG might have returned to making the G6 a flagship device earlier this year (and it’s a great phone in it’s own right, check out my review for that if you’re interested), but a lot of the V20 users from last year have been waiting for the V series successor instead.
Well, that day has finally come and it could have been worth the wait.
The new V30 takes some of the design language from G6 in a lot of ways–and that’s a definitely not a bad thing.
From the 6″ QuadHD+ 18:9 aspect ratio screen with the same minimal bezels with albeit more curved edges which I like, to the back of the device with it’s metallic looking Gorilla Glass 5 back it fits a sleeker and modern look we’re getting from manufacturers this year.
That screen, by the way, an P-OLED one instead of LCD so blacks are blacker, colors pop, it’s looks super vibrant.
On the left side of the phone we have the volume buttons, on the right we have the SIM tray and MicroSD card slot.
At the bottom we have the USB Type-C port and at the top our headphone jack.
Above the screen we have our 5MP wide angle front facing camera and around back we have our dual camera setup similar to the G6.
We have one wide and one normal angled camera with one being 13MP with an aperture of f1.9 and one 16MP one with a crazy f1.6 aperture. From the quick time I’ve had with the phone I can tell you photos look super sharp and I always find the wide angle lens to be something I end up using a lot more than you’d think.
LG also added some other interesting features to the camera of the V30 including a Cine Video mode that let’s you select from a bunch of what are essentially LUTs more so than filters as they actually change the image data while recording instead of just laying something over it. LUTs are used by cinematographers and editors when they shoot in Log of RAW format where the colors are subdued allowing for more dynamic range out of the camera and giving them a lot more freedom to then add color back in exactly how they want.
The result is some pretty interesting looks that are much more pronounced than a quick filter.
Because of this, LG also gives you the option to actually record in their own Log footage for if you wanted to get serious and color correct it yourself in a video editor on your computer.
They also added a neat zooming effect: you can tap on an area of the screen and then be able to smoothly zoom into that area instead of the normal zooming into the middle like normal. Not sure how much I’ll use it but nice little extra tool when trying to make creative videos on your phone, for sure.
Expect me to absolutely test all of this out when I get a review unit.
In addition to the serious focus on the camera, LG also put a lot of thought into the audio as well.
The V30 has a Hi-Fi Quad 32-bit DAC for better audio playback, as well as better audio recording thanks to 2 AOP higher range mics built in.
Under the cameras we have our fingerprint sensor/power button combo but LG also added a facial recognition option to unlock the phone as well as a voice option that let’s you set a phrase to unlock the phone with.
Powering the device is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, 4GBs of RAM and it’s running the latest Android version with LG’s UX on top.
It is IP68 certified so water and dust resistant and also has a military spec rating for durability as well.
And there you go, quick run down of the latest and greatest from LG. Clearly this is a device aimed at creators with all the camera and audio features I mentioned so I’m excited to test it out and see how that goes personally.
Subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on social for the review when it goes live and I’ll be doing some other tutorials with it as well in the meantime.
Let me know what you think of the new phone in the comments below and thanks for reading!
