LG V40 ThinQ review: 6.4" QuadHD display, 6GB of RAM, Snapdragon 845, available for preorder now for $900+; five camera system is versatile but not high-quality
The V40 gives you a camera bag full of lenses in one device — All too often, when we evaluate smartphone cameras, we are looking at incremental improvements.
Context & Ripple Effects
LG's V-series has been its most focused flagship line: the V30 launched in 2017 to a warm reception as 'the phone the G6 should have been,' praised for polish and video shooting, while the G7 ThinQ earlier in 2018 stuck to a conventional dual-camera formula. The V40 now jumps to five cameras — three rear, two front — at a $900+ preorder price.
The catch in the review is that versatility isn't quality: The Verge credits the lens lineup but withholds the image-quality crown. That matters because the multi-camera race LG is running here gets an answer six months later when Huawei ships the P30 Pro with four cameras and up to 10x lossless zoom at €999.
First-order effects
- Buyers preordering the V40 at $900+ are paying flagship money for range of framing options rather than best-in-class photos, which puts the device's value proposition on reviewers' terms rather than LG's spec sheet.
Second-order effects
- Huawei's P30 Pro shows competitors responding not by matching camera counts but by pairing them with a headline capability — extreme lossless zoom — that turns quantity into a demonstrable quality claim.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, rear-camera count becomes table stakes across flagships and premium pricing shifts to whichever vendor can prove per-lens output quality, leaving LG's breadth-first strategy exposed against zoom- and processing-led rivals.
The trend: Flagship smartphones are racing from dual to quad-plus camera arrays, with competitive advantage migrating from how many lenses a phone carries to what each lens can actually deliver.