Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 Review: Dual Camera Smartphone Under Budget

Panasonic is the company that launches two or three phones in every quarter-yearly. Eluga is the most popular series of the Panasonic and they keep expanding it. All the Panasonic Elgua phones mostly fall between 6000 to 15000 INR range. If we talk about the Eluga series then in the online market it is still difficult for Panasonic to beat the Chineses players at the price they are offering their phones. But in the offline space, they can make their space in the budget category very safely.

In the month of Sep 2017, the Panasonic has launched the two new Panasonic smartphones, the Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 and Eluga Ray 700. The Eluga Ray 500 will cost you Rs. 8,999, while the Eluga Ray 700 costs Rs. 9,999. In this article, we going to do to the point review of Panasonic Eluga RAY 500 and let you know whether this worth to buy or not.

Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 Detailed Specifications

 

Panasonic Eluga Ray 500: Inside the Box

• Handset (Inclusive of Battery)
• Charger
• USB Cable
• Protective Screen Guard
• Quick Start Guide
• Earphones
• SIM Insertion Pin
• Warranty Card
• Headset
• 1 Year on Handset, 6 Months on Accessories

 

Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 Desing and Display Review

In terms of design, the Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 built well but features plastic body. The body of Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 seems to be a metal but it is not. The plastic body is really not an issue for us because the plastic is of great quality. There is nothing innovative in terms of design, at the back side it has dual camera setup in the same format most of the smartphones have today. The single flash LED sits near the dual camera setup while the middle back portion has Panasonic branding.

The micro USB 2.0 port is flanked between two speaker grills but only right side grill has the speaker and other is just for the showcase. The 3.5mm audio port resides on the top of the phone.

Coming to the front side, it has 5.0 inch IPS HD 1280 x 720 Pixels resolution display and for protection, it has NEG2 Glass. Basically, this Glass provides heat resistant and basic protection. The phone has 2.5D curved panel and round edges. The navigation buttons are given on the screen and the portion below it has the only pressable home button along fingerprint sensor. It disappointed us that the space around the home button is the complete waste.

 

The upper portion of the front display has the, as usual, front camera, light sensor, and ear speaker.

If we talk about the display quality which is good in terms of viewing angle and brightness. Due to its good viewing angle, three persons can easily share the screen while watching videos or gaming. The downside of the display is the color appeared a little bit washed out and also not much sharp. To enhance the picture quality the phone has pre-installed Miravision engine software to tune the display picture mode.

Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 Camera Review

The camera is the essential part of any phone and every user wants a good camera in their smartphone. By the way, Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 has the 13MP + 8MP Dual camera setup but it seems a gimmick. Its appear that dual camera are just to capture the images in wide-angle mode. But if you talk about the picture quality which is good but not as it should be in dual camera smartphone. The color produces by the camera in the pictures appeared wash and dull. In spite of dual camera, still, the camera struggles to create a bokeh effect while mobile photography. The good thing about the camera is the focus, wide angle and its shutter speed. The low light images appear noisy but acceptable if you see the price of the smartphone.

Moving towards the Eluga Ray 500 camera app which is quite good and easy to use. It has 5 Color effects, HDR mode, wide-angle picture capture capability, Face beauty mode,  and Panorama. Under the Video shooting mode, it is capable of shooting High Definition video and comes along with features such as Noise reduction, and Electronic Image Stabilization. We captured a video while walking to test the EIS functionality but it doesn’t help us much.

For self-lovers, the Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 features 5 MP, aperture F/N 2.4, and offers Beauty and HDR mode.  We don’t have any complaints about its selfie camera and one can easily use its capture selfies for their social media accounts.

Here are few Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 Camera image sample for reference.

Note: We have reduced the sizes of these sample images to upload on the website otherwise all these images possess the HD resolution.

 

Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 Performance, Specifications, Software, and Benchmarks

The Panasonic Eluga Ray  500 runs on the Android 7.0 Nougat and using stock interface with minor customization. It also has company’s in-house developed Artificial Intelligence software called ARBO. The Arbo gives you a couple of suggestion by keep tracking your apps using behavior. But you can’t compare it with the Apple’s Siri or Google Assitant. Under the back cover, the chipset it uses is Mediatek MTK6737 and  1.25GHz Quad Processor. For multitasking the phone installed with 3GB RAM and 32 GB ROM for storage that can be expandable up to 128GB using Hybrid SIM card slot. The given configuration sounds good at the price of 8,999 but at the same price, the Redmi 4 offer better specs than the Eluga Ray 500.  The processor in Redmi 4 is Snapdragon 425 1.4GHz Octa Core along Adreno 505 GPU.

Comparision between Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 Vs Redmi 4

The overall performance of Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 is average and if you overstuff or use heavy apps int the phone then you might face little bit sluggish performance. It can handle the high-end games such as Asphalt but still, the gaming performance is an average. We didn’t face any major heating issue or lag in the smartphone due to stock Android. Using camera continuously for a long time can give a minor but acceptable heat. 4G is supported and VoLTE works too.

Full-HD videos play smoothly on the Eluga Ray 500 but any video above that can put the phone under heavy usage & it struggles in rendering. It has a single loudspeaker which is not great for watching a movie but provides fair sound during ringtones and alerts. All the standard Google apps are present in the phone such as Google Photos and Play Music for audio files

The Fingerprint scanner placed under the Home button and the accuracy is good. Out of 10 times, it successfully unlocks the phone about 9 times.

Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 Benchmark scores

In our benchmarks, the Panasonic Eluga Ray 500 scores as follow:

Geekbench it scores:

Single-Core: 580

Multi-Core: 1589

In Anutu benchmark Eluga Ray 500 scores 29714

 

 

Panasonic Eluga Ray Battery Review

The Panasonic Eluga Ray battery is the best in its class as it offers 4000mAh battery. In our battery test in which we ran Full HD video on YouTube at full volume, the phone lasts for 7 hours 40 minutes. If you are a regular user the phone can give more than a day backup under 4G VoLTE usage. There is no fast charging option so, the phone takes around 2 hours to get a full charge.

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