ZTE Blade V review

Its cheap, but is it cheerful?

ZTE Blade V review
Cheap - but at what cost?

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The poor experience that we found in taking still images is, unsurprisingly, repeated on the video camera.

The bland camera app is out again in force, although interestingly unlike other Jelly Bean handsets, you still have to manually toggle between still and video recording.

We know it isn't a whole lot of effort, but it's the small things that allude to a smarter experience overall.

Unfortunately, there are none of the fancy camera tricks to be used on the video, meaning that you have to record just standard imagery (no black and white or sepia tone to cover up the cameras deficiencies).

Within the settings menu, there is very little to be found. You can turn the video recording down, from 480p to QVGA to QCIF.

This should aid in sharing all your antics with your friends via the likes of WhatsApp, but will never be sufficient for uploading to the web.

You can also toggle the time lapse interval, the white balance, as well as choosing whether or not you want flash on during recording. We couldn't see a way of manually zooming whilst recording.

Video recording results are also poor. We wouldn't use the ZTE Blade V for anything more than recording our cat doing something silly, although if you want that clip to become the next YouTube sensation, you will want to look at an alternate handset.