The LG V20 is a smartphone that boasts an impressive array of features and capabilities, making it a standout device in its class. One of the most notable aspects of the camera on the LG V20 is its ability to control everything from photos and video to focus peaking, which makes it easier to determine if your subject is in focus. This feature is particularly useful for content creators who need precise control over their footage.

The camera also offers a plethora of settings that can be adjusted, including wide variety of video recording resolutions, frame rates, and bit rates. Additionally, users can add film grade effects and record Hi-Fi audio during videos for improved sound quality. The camera's audio controls include built-in filters such as gain, low cut, limiter, wind noise filter, and microphone sensitivity adjustments. Users can even monitor the audio levels directly through the viewfinder while recording.

Despite its advanced camera capabilities, the LG V20 also features Optical image stabilization, which is primarily designed for photos rather than video. However, users who want smoother looking footage on their videos can enable LG's Steady Record software stabilization. This feature does make a significant difference in reducing jerkiness and wobbling, but it also introduces some subtle warping or "Jell-O effect," particularly noticeable on the wide-angle lens.

One of the standout features of the LG V20 is its manual controls for both photos and video. Having all these settings at one's fingertips is incredibly convenient and empowering. However, when shooting in Auto mode, picture quality is merely good but not exceptional. The camera tends to overexpose highlights and struggles with handling bright colors like reds, oranges, and yellows.

Low-light shots do show some noticeable noise, which is mitigated by the camera's lack of aggressive noise reduction. Furthermore, the camera's white balance is heavily influenced by surrounding light sources, particularly on the wide-angle lens, leading to either over- or underexposure. These issues highlight the LG V20's reliance on manual controls for optimal results.

The front-facing camera on the LG V20 remains a 5-megapixel sensor, similar to last year's model. However, instead of two separate front-facing cameras, there is only one lens, which results in cropping and reduced image quality when using the standard angle setting. As such, users are advised to stick with the wide-angle setting for better results.

In contrast to some of its competitors, the LG V20 takes a more measured approach, focusing on being a solid smartphone rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. This approach has yielded positive results, as evidenced by the device's impressive design, large display, feature-rich camera, and exceptional audio capabilities. The inclusion of a removable battery and expandable storage is also a welcome feature.

In many ways, the LG V20 can be seen as the perfect smartphone for those seeking a productivity powerhouse. With its massive screen, advanced features, and robust hardware, it checks all the boxes for power users. While not the flashiest device on the market, the LG V20's understated approach makes it an attractive option for those who value substance over style.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh so this is the LG v20 this is LG's big Flagship for the second half of 2016 and it's the successor to last year's V10 but it's been completely redesigned with a new look that's a lot more similar to the G5 than it is the V10 instead of those stainless steel rails and dur skin material the v20 swaps all of that out for a mostly metal design with polycarbonate on the top and bottom chin it doesn't look quite as unique as the V10 did and I've actually had a few people confuse it for an HDC phone but it is a pretty good-looking phone regardless and feels really good in the hand this despite the change in design and materials the v20 still carries a military 810g rating that makes it extremely durable against shocks and drops and it's nice that LG was able to keep this feature on the v20 without making it look so obvious now if you didn't know any better you'd think that the v20 is a completely unibody metal smartphone but it's not there's actually a button on the lower right side that releases the catch mechanism for the metal back plate giving access to the removable battery your sim and the micro SD card slide when the back plate is on it sits completely flush and doesn't slide or move around and it feels just like any other smartphone out there that's made of metal the build quality is absolutely topnotch and you really have to commend LG because no matter how much their design changes or what materials they use they always figure out a way to keep that removable battery they've realized that there's still a lot of people out there that still want a removable battery and out of all the major ball players like Samsung HTC or Motorola LG is the only company that has held on to this feature and it kind of makes LG smartphones a little bit more unique and there's almost no excuse anymore to having a metal smartphone without a removable battery and I would really like to see this happen in a lot of other smartphones another feature that the v20 has that a lot of OEM seem to have done away with for whatever reason is an IR blaster so if you like controlling your TV and other peripherals with your smartphone you certainly can do that with the v20 on the back of the phone you have LG signature rear-facing power button but just like the G5 the volume keys are no longer on the back instead you'll find them sitting in a more traditional spot on the left side which I personally prefer and there's no real issues with the power and volume buttons at all they're both very clicky tactile and easy to press the power button of course also doubles as a fingerprint sensor and it works extremely well it's fast accurate takes very little time to set up and unlike some other phones that use a physical button for a fingerprint sensor you you don't have to press the v20s power button down in order for it to read your fingerprint which makes it feel that much faster along the bottom is the headphone jack USB type-c port and the single firing speaker which isn't going to compare to phones with dual speakers or front-facing speakers but for a single firing speaker it's one of the better ones that I've heard in a long while the real audio experience with the v20 is on the inside it's got a quad Dack built in and without getting into any specifics this basically means that you're going to get much higher quality audio with less Distortion and noise and much better dynamic range as long as you have a decent pair of headphones you're going to hear a huge difference in how your audio sounds and because of the built- in Quad DAC it's able to power much higher impedance headphones even with streaming audio it makes a pretty significant impact but you also have support for lossless audio files like flak and you have a 75 stage volume control along with left and right balance controls to really fine-tune the audio to your ears something to be aware of is that the v20 in Asian markets will have audio tuning done by bang and olivon whereas the v20 here in the states will have audio tuning done by LG as to what the differences are or if there are any differences at all we don't really know as I haven't heard the B and Alon version but what I can say though is that I've had zero complaints with the audio tuning done by LG not only is the v20 able to play back much higher quality audio it's also capable of recording higher quality audio the built-in HD audio recorder lets you record audio in 24-bit Flack file and it can handle really high inputs which means you can record really loud and noisy environments like sporting events or concerts without the audio clipping or sounding distorted these audio recording capabilities also extend over to video but we'll talk more about that when we get into the camera just like the V10 last year the LG v20 comes with two displays the main display is a 5.7 in IPS LCD with Quad HD resolution and it's bright enough that it's visible Outdoors has good viewing angles and with such a high pixel density it's super super sharp and easy to read my only complaint would be that the colors aren't quite as vibrant as I would like but otherwise it's a pretty good-looking screen just as you would expect from a high-end Flagship the secondary display is still at the top and LG's made a few improvements to it on the v20 it's slightly larger and brighter making it a little bit easier to see Outdoors but functionally it does all the same things as it did last year it can show a variety of different things like app shortcuts recently opened apps media controls upcoming calendar events your favorite contacts and quick toggles to basic settings like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and when the main display is turned off it'll show you basic information like the time date and battery life you can also set a custom signature but because the screen is wider now you can set signatures that are much longer with more characters and if you want to take it a step further you can even set a custom signature wallpaper to match the second screen isn't entirely necessary and it's one of those features that you may not use all the time but it's nice to know that it's there in the off chance that do want to use it and if you give it a legitimate chance you might find it to be really useful I actually like it a lot for the features that it provides especially the app shortcuts you can customize it with up to five of your favorite or most commonly used apps and the app shortcuts will also show you notification badges anytime you receive a new notification which I thought was a really nice touch I do however wish that the screen was AMOLED instead of LCD because it's really easy to notice light bleed coming from the second screen when the main display is turned off it's it's not a huge deal but it is something you will see when you're using the phone in the dark the rest of the specs are pretty typical of what you would find on a 2016 Flagship there's a Snapdragon 820 chip inside with the adreno 530 and 4 GB of RAM and even with LG's somewhat heavy skin performance on the v20 has been very buttery smooth it does all the day-to-day things with very little issues it opens apps quickly touch responsiveness is great and multitasking back and forth between applications has been a very fluid experience the v20 also handles game like a champ and because it's running Android nougat you're getting much better graphics and gaming performance with Vulcan supported games speaking of Android nougat the LG v20 is the very first phone to ship with Android 7.0 out of the box which was surprisingly unexpected considering this historically has always been a Nexus phone but I guess Google chose to switch things up quite a bit this year it's a selling point for this phone right now since there aren't that many phones running nougat at the moment but that's obviously going to be very shortlived since it's running nougat you're getting all the features we've seen from this update like built-in multi- window support the revamp notifications direct reply customizable quick toggles and Do's on the go just to name a few the only feature that I noticed I was missing is the system UI tuner I'm not entirely sure why LG chose to leave that out but it would have been nice to have considering how useful it is on other devices currently running nougat like the Nexus 6p and Google's brand new pixel phones on top of Android 7.0 is LG's custom skin and it looks and feels a lot like what we saw on the G5 it's still really bright colorful and somewhat cartoonish and by default there isn't an appd drawer but this isn't that big of a deal anymore since you can easily revert back to an app drawer in the settings there's also built-in themes made specifically for the v20 which is great if you don't like the default color scheme unfortunately there's only a few to pick from right now but hopefully we'll see more options pop up in the next couple of months it is cleaner than previous versions of LG skin and a lot less intrusive but it would have been nice if did a lot more with it to make it flow better with Android nougat because outside of the fact that it's running nougat the overall experience still feels the same as what we saw on the G5 for a phone that has two screens a quad Dack and is capable of doing so many things with photos and video you would think that would have a much larger battery and while 3200 Mah hours isn't necessarily small for a phone that is significantly bigger than the S7 Edge it's a little surprising it didn't have a bigger battery like I mentioned earlier the upside of course is that you can swap batteries in and out as you see fit and despite the battery not being as big as you would expect it is enough to last me a full day with my usage of texting email social media streaming music and a few hours of gaming and YouTube per day but I typically never had a whole lot of battery life left over I would say that the battery life will be good enough for most people but don't expect this phone to last all day if you plan on using its video and audio capabilities extremely heavily of course with this being the V 20 the camera experience on this phone is a pretty big deal it's got two cameras on the back just like the LG G5 with a 16 megapixel main sensor at f1.8 an optical image stabilization and an 8 megapix wide angle sensor at f2.4 just like the wideangle lens that was on the G5 I absolutely love the wide angle lens on the v20 even though the quality is not as good as the main sensor the wideangle lens is just a ton of fun to use and works perfectly for a variety of different situations like group photos and Landscapes it makes a huge difference over the standard angle of the main sensor and not only can you fit more into the frame but the wide angle effect just makes your shots look that much more Dynamic LG's camera app is very featur especially when it comes to manual controls for photos and video and it's pretty incredible how much they've been able to pack into this camera you can control everything from white balance ISO exposure shutter speed and focus just like you would on a real camera one of the most useful changes LG's camera is that it now has built-in focus peaking which makes it a lot easier to tell if your subject is in focus and if you're a content creator you'll know exactly how useful focus peeking can be on the video side of things there's a plethora of settings that you can change you can pick from a wide variety of video recording resolutions including 4K adjust the frame rate and bit rate add film grade effects and record Hi-Fi audio during your videos for improved sound quality not only do you have a lot of controls for video but you also have a lot of controls for audio all of what you can adjust as you're recording video These include built-in controls for gain a low cut filter a limiter a wind noise filter the ability to change the direction of the microphone sensitivity and you can even monitor the audio levels directly through the viewfinder while the camera does have Optical image stabilization it doesn't do a whole lot for video even just casually walking will cause a lot of jerkiness if you want smoother looking footage you can turn on LG's steady record software stabilization and it does make a significant difference but you'll notice some slight warping or Jell-O effect especially in the corners and it's even more noticeable on the wide angle lens so it works but it's far from perfect having all of LG's manual controls at your fingertips is really awesome but if you're purely shooting in Auto picture quality is good but it isn't great there's plenty of color saturation and sharpness and most of the time you'll probably be pretty satisfied with the shots that you take but it doesn't have the greatest dynamic range it always has the tendency to overexpose and blow out highlights and it doesn't handle bright colors like Reds oranges and yellows all that well lowl shots will show some noise which is just to be expected but the camera isn't over aggressive with noise reduction which helps preserve some sharpness and detail but the camera's white balance is very heavily influenced from surrounding light sources especially on the wide angle lens they'll either turn out way too cold or way too warm and just like in most shots it doesn't do well with properly exposing highlights it's pretty obvious the camera's real strength lies in its manual controls and just like any camera whether it be a smartphone or a DSLR you'll always get a much better shot if you're willing to take the time and dial in these settings yourself now the front-facing camera is still a 5 megapixel sensor just like it was on last year's V10 but instead of two front-facing cameras you only have one this time you still have the option to pick between a standard angle and a wide angle but because it's only working off of One sensor it's actually cropping the image so what you're looking at right now is the wide angle and this is what it looks like with the standard angle and as you can see the quality deteriorates quite a bit because again it's cropping the image so for best results I would recommend sticking with the wide angle and you can always choose to crop it after the fact if you want although the v20 may share some similarities with the G5 it's a complete 180 from the G5 and is exactly the smartphone LG needed to turn 2016 into a success what makes the v20 so great is that it isn't trying to do anything different or crazy and instead just focuses on being a good smartphone it's got a new and improved metal design a big beautiful display a very feature-rich camera and an awesome audio experience with this built-in quad dck the best part is LG managed to pack in all of this while still keeping features that matter the most like the removable battery and expandable storage and that's something you can always count on an LG phone to have with the Note 7 out of the picture the v20 can have the ENT ire Spotlight to itself as that big screen productivity Powerhouse and if that's what you're looking for the LG v20 is the perfect smartphone to fill that void as always thank you guys so much for watching this video I hope you enjoyed this review of the LG v20 and if you did please give it a thumbs up down below leave your thoughts down in the comments below and also subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and check us out on social media Instagram Twitter Snapchat Google+ all that good stuff will be linked down below and also feel free to follow me on Twitter as well that is also down below and as always check the website Android authority.com for more in-depth coverage because we are your source for all things Android\n"