LG Optimus 3D review

Is the world's first glasses-free 3D smartphone worth the premium price?

LG Optimus 3D
The first 3D mobile phone isn't cheap

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Again, the LG Optimus 3D comes with both 2D and 3D video abilities. In 3D you're limited to recording at 720p resolution, while 2D video clips go all the way up to the 'Full HD' 1080p image format.

And again, the 3D effect when viewing video on the phone's glasses-free 3D display is excellent. We obviously can't show it to you very well here, but it does come across convincingly. It's not a pretend effect – you really can see the depth of the images.

LG optimus 3d

LG has even included a "Depth" slider bar on the 3D video player, which is used to fiddle with the 3D effect. It makes a big difference too, with the filter adjusting the 3D intensity of both pre-recorded YouTube material and your own 3D clips to suit your eyes and brain.

It's a little flickery on playback, especially when switching between light and dark areas, but for a first go at mobile phone 3D it's a very impressive effort. 3D videos are encoded into standard MP4 format, so when viewed on your PC you see both the left and right frames side by side and squashed up a little.

Youtube

Back in the 2D world, LG's camera records its 1080p clips in MP4 format as well, producing good results. Images are fairly sharp – the sensor switches smoothly between light and dark bits of the image, with the quick autofocus keeping everything clear.

The frame rate was always smooth for us, even at maximum resolution, with a lot of background detail coming across in the footage. It's a very nice video camera.

The Optimus 3D's 1080p video clips look smooth, and there's data to back that up - VLC tells us the 2D videos are recorded at a solid 30fps. It's just as smooth when recording in 3D mode, too, with the 720p three-dimensional footage also emerging at 30fps.

LG optimus 3d

2D video recording options are more limited than in the still camera, with users able to change resolutions, select from a few white balance presets, put on a handful of sepia and negative filter effects, toggle audio recording and set the phone to save video to internal memory or SD card.