LG G8X Review | A Year Old but Now Great Value Except... By DrekiTech

Hey everyone Rickie here- and this is the lg g8x it's on sale for under 350 and that's a hell of a deal for these specifications. No ugly camera bump headphone jack. It almost sounds too good to be true. So let's take a look at the phone, its unique dual screen case, and then we'll talk a little about my experiences with it. I enjoyed my month with this phone, but I'm not going to keep it as my daily driver and there's kind of one big reason why well spoiler alert it kind of definitely has to do with those cameras. I picked up my phone for under two hundred dollars.

Second hand in mint condition. eBay is a steal for these things, and they're dime a dozen I'm someone who's unwilling to pay a thousand dollars or more for a flagship device. So 200 is an absolute bargain, especially when you consider the benefits of this phone, in particular. The headphone jack, I think, is first and foremost, there aren't very many high-end phones with the headphone jack and on this lg. It's not just some lame budget phone type, headphone jack.

That gives crummy audio. This is top tier, amazing sound, and it can actually drive a decent set of over ear headphones. Next is the design I've seen some other reviewers call it plain and boring, but quite frankly I like it. The screen is flat, meaning those cheap glass screen protectors, actually work on this thing and there are no curves or reflections around the edge. The back is flat, no massive ugly camera bump, and that makes it stand out with its under spoken subtlety.

You only get two rear cameras which we'll go more into detail about in a second and finally, you do get the rest of this flagship: phone perks, memory card expansion, fast charging, wireless charging, NFC and even lg's UI is actually pretty decent. This time around they've really toned back on the lioness, and that makes it quite easy to get the hang of coming off of a Samsung or google device. Finally, the real reason to get this phone is the cool dual screen accessory. You can get, but it is kind of like duct taping, a second phone to the main phone in terms of extra heft and even usability. So let's take a look about that first, because it's probably the most interesting thing about this phone presenting the world's cheapest folding phone yay.

Wait! Wouldn't that actually just be a flip phone for, like five bucks anyways, the dual screen accessory of the lg g8x can be picked up for around 100 to 150 one bay, and it makes what is otherwise a sleek, beautiful and slim device into one hell of a chunky monkey. The reaction of others to my phone ranged from bemusement to perfection, to one person saying what the f is wrong with your phone. That is until I showed them what it actually did, and then they were all like. Hey that's cool, I guess, and I'd reply yeah. I guess so, and they were pretty excited until they saw me actually using it and their excitement kind of changed to oh yeah.

That's that's pretty cool. I guess, and that describes my entire experience with the dual screen accessory yeah. It is pretty cool, but it's also really only functional in certain limited use cases, and here they are watching YouTube while doing other things. Unless you want to do anything in portrait mode, then your YouTube's going to be sideways. Second thing: it's perfect for is using it as a stand, which is probably the primary thing I did with it, because it looks like a little mini laptop and that's pretty.

Rad third is typing, which I found to actually be more inconvenient, because now I needed to use two hands due to the extra size. Fourth is taking notes on one screen and browsing on the other, so, for example, making a calendar appointment while having the email with the appointment information on the other side. So you don't have to keep switching back and forth, but basically, unless you want to run two apps side by side, the functionality of the second screen is a little limited. For example, it can't run most apps twice, which really sucks because there are times where I wanted to compare photos from one camera onto the other, but I can't do that because there's just no way to have two photo galleries running unless I downloaded a second app. The second screen, I could see it being important for business people if it had its own battery and didn't leach off the main phone.

Well at least lg is trying here's a sample of the speaker and, as you can hear, it's kind of tinny and flat sounding. So now, let's talk about the cameras because yeah there must be some limitation to these cameras, because there are sacrifices that lg has made to get the cameras smooth on the back like this I'd call them merely okay, they're, not really that great they're not terrible either they're more like what I'd expect out of a mid-range device with a decent amount of detail, but pretty aggressive, HDR processing lg's overly aggressive HDR is awful, resulting in photos with low contrast, dull, colors and smudge details. Turning it off does improve results somewhat, but the best results for photos are had with a third-party app such as g-cam, I'm only showing photos from the default camera app here. The main camera is fine in daylight, but a little worse in low light compared to some songs, iPhones and googles, but for the most part it does an adequate job and unless you're picky, you won't really notice the difference, but it's really the wide angle and selfie camera that are the things that keep me from recommending this phone wholeheartedly to mid-range enthusiasts. Neither of these supplementary cameras have autofocused, and it can be disturbingly obvious.

At times, selfies taking closer than arm's length are blurry. You really need to stretch out in order to get actual details on your face, and the same thing is true of close-up shots with the ultra-wide for framing and artistic purposes. If you wanted to get close to something anything closer than about five feet, or nearly two meters is gonna, be blurry, the only thing ever in focus is the background, and it really does a disservice to what is otherwise a decent camera setup. Unfortunately, there's no zoom camera either, but for me, that's not the biggest sacrifice ever just something you might want to notice night and low light is also not great from these cameras, the main camera I find it really tries to HDR process too strong and in the end, with this HDR multiple photos trying to get the bright the low light everything sort of combined into one photo. It makes unrealistic looking photos overall with colors that are really saturated and punchy, and the dark areas sometimes lack contrast.

Thankfully, since it's winter and there's lots of opportunities to take night photos, I caught tons and tons of these shots of Christmas lights, for example, and really as I was shooting these, I honestly thought well, I would have done better with my last phone, which was the Samsung s9 in the end again, if you're not picky, they're going to be fine, but for me yeah, I definitely was aware that phones can do better out of the box. If you really care about photo quality, you may want to look elsewhere when it comes to video. My criticisms are pretty similar to the photos where sometimes the colors are a bit too punchy and the HDR processing is too aggressive, which makes it look kind of unrealistic there's, also a pretty cool and hyper aggressive image stabilization that makes the camera look like it's on a gimbals works really well for walking or riding the bike, but in low light it darkens up the video quite a lot. This is 4k 60 frames per second from the lg g8x main camera, and this is 4k 30 frames per second, with default image stabilization, you can switch to the ultra-wide camera. If you want it's pretty seamless switch back.

This mode also has HDR functionality, whereas 4k60 does not- and this is 4k 30 with the advanced stabilization turned on which disables all the other features like HDR. It also seems to reduce the detail which I can see on the screen of the phone and when I'm panning left to right, sometimes a little of jittering, but not too bad. Overall, I'm gonna start walking here and see what this clip is like just holding the phone out in front of me. How about running, and then this is back to the basic stabilization mode, walking and then running. Finally, this is 1080p, which is the default resolution of the lg camera, just to see what it looks like compared to 4k.

This is a video sample from the lg g8x selfie camera. It doesn't have autofocus. So if I go close to my face, things are going to be out of focus while the background still stays sharp. This is at 4k 30 frames per second, the maximum that this camera shoots looks like. There is basic image stabilization as well, which is pretty nice, but nothing too advanced, just sort of like an electronic image, stabilization type thing, and then here's 1080p 30 from the selfie camera.

This is the default setting. This is a night video sample with the lg g8x. As you can see, it's pretty low light just after sunset, streetlights are on and yeah, so are the Christmas lights. So hopefully this looks pretty good. It's hard to tell on the little tiny phone screen this time, I'm filming at 4k 30 with the gyro stabilization setting on and wow.

It really increases the stabilization. Furthermore, it does seem to darken the video and crop in a little more. So this is the difference between this setting and the regular video setting 1080p, which has other effects like HDR, can't seem to find that in 4k, but uh well, yeah. Well, it's not just these cars headlights that make the difference in terms of the video recording 1080p with the HDR setting turned on is much, much brighter in low light. So this is a low light video sample from the front facing camera on the lg g8x.

It's funny. This LED streetlight above me almost makes it look like I'm on a set just because there's such a strong four light compared to the background back there, but I figured this was a good place to test it, because, if you're under low light, it's probably like street lighting or night lighting, or something like that- I bet you it's going to be super-duper windy all right. Let's turn on the advanced image stabilization now and look at how much darker everything is. This is with the advanced, gyroscopic image stabilization turned on. You can barely see my headlights, you may wonder why there's an excess of night footage in this review and that's because it is winter here, and we only get a couple of hours of daylight and I work most of those hours so in standard image, stabilization mode, I can switch between the main camera and the wide angle camera just like that.

It's pretty seamless! Actually, that's really cool, be like oh wow. I want to see more of these hoses huh, it's much darker, so conclusion time I had to make a choice with the lg g8x. What do I use more, my headphone jack or my cameras, and for me, it's pretty obvious? I use my cameras by far the most wired headphones, they're, really my backup plan and if my wireless ones are out of battery, or I've forgotten them at home. So as I switch to the next phone that I'm going to review without a headphone jack, I know I'm going to come across a situation where I find that extremely frustrating, but in reality that situation is going to be maybe once in a month my priority was better cameras. The lg g8x it doesn't really deliver on that.

It's relatively subpar and that's mainly due to the secondary lenses not having autofocus otherwise yeah, I'm quite happy with this phone. It's a great balance of performance features and I really do like the subtle design without those ugly camera bumps from the moment I picked up this phone. Furthermore, it felt natural to use the battery life is excellent. Nearly two days there was nothing that set out as upsetting frustrating or quirky. This phone was easy to get in the groove of and in the end I had to think long and hard before deciding to move on.

Maybe it'll be the right device for you, though, considering its low cost has a good headphone jack, and if camera is not a priority, then yeah it's really worth checking out especially second hand, hey thanks for watching. Hopefully, this review was helpful. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below, and please don't forget the thumbs and subs support my channel so give one of those. If you really did like the video, you want to see more random tech. Also, going to do some disc golf stuff, so stay tuned for that.

Source : DrekiTech