Loving the Google Pixel 8 Pro Camera Upgrade (Premium)

I don’t recall ever having issues with Google’s Pixel Camera app, but the new design is a nice improvement, with a slider for switching between Photo and Video modes that’s straddled by a new Photo/Video Settings button on the left and (on the Pixel 8 Pro only) a Pro Controls button the right. Each of those buttons displays a panel whose contents depend on whether you’re in Photo or Video mode, and there are more photo-related settings than there are for video in each.

The Pro Controls button offers access to manual controls Brightness, Shadow, White Balance, Focus, and Shutter Speed that used to be available over the viewfinder in previous versions of the app (I guess it got a bit cluttered). And in keeping with its “pro” nature, there’s also a new display at the top of the screen while this panel is open that lists the camera aperture, focus mode, shutter speed, and ISO.

The Photo/Video Settings pane also has a few extras: It’s where you access the Camera app’s settings interface, via a More settings button. And if you’re in Photo mode, it has both General and Pro tabs, and it was in the latter that I found something unexpected, a Lens Selection option that can be changed from its default, Auto, to Manual.

Could it be?

It could: This change fixes what is probably my single biggest frustration with the smartphone photography experience, Pixel or otherwise. Let me explain.

The Pixel Camera app normally displays four on-screen buttons in the viewfinder, for .5x, 1x, 2x, and 5x zoom, similar to what you see on the iPhone and other smartphones.

And as is the case with the iPhone 15 Pro Max I just reviewed, Pixels have always had a lens shift problem where you select a zoom level, point the phone at whatever object you’re trying to photograph, and then try to take a picture, only to have it shift annoyingly from lens to lens. Many times, I have it exactly where I want it and it shifts to a less desirable framing before I can press the shutter button.

But when you switch the Lens Selection setting to Manual, the Pixel Camera app displays three on-screen buttons, U, M, and T, each of which maps to a specific camera lens.

This setting eliminates the annoying lens shifting: Because you manually selected the lens you want, as opposed to an arbitrary zoom level that can in many cases be achieved by two of the lenses, the Pixel Camera app stops trying to outthink you. It just utilizes the lens you selected.

You can, of course, still zoom in or out from whichever lens you select normally, using normal pinch-to-zoom touch gestures. When you do, Pixel Camera responds as expected, and it displays on-the-fly zoom values as you adjust the view. But in manual lens selection mode, it only does so within the confines of each lens’s capabilities. For example, the telephoto lens starts at 5x zoom, which is optical, and you can zoom up (using hybrid “Super Res Zoom”) to 30x, but not down below 5x. The main (wide) lens starts at 1x and can zoom up to 5x. And the ultrawide lens starts at .5x and can zoom up to 1x.

This is … genius. And while most users will likely never even find this option let alone want to change it, this may be my favorite new Pixel Camera feature. It’s one of those things that is immediately obvious the second you understand it, and then you wonder what took so long for it to happen.

There is (at least) one interesting side-effect of this change, though. The Pixel Camera app can switch into macro mode automatically using the ultra-wide lens when you zoom in enough on an object, a feature Google calls Macro Focus, but this mode is unavailable when you use manual lens selection. Instead, all you can do is switch, ahem, manually to the ultra-wide lens, get nice and close to your subject, and then zoom in, up to 1x. (With Macro Focus, you can zoom in further, though I find the results can get mushy if you’re not quite still.) Put simply, I don’t use macro mode enough to worry about this.

There are other camera changes in the Pixel 8 Pro, of course, and some are tied to its unique and updated hardware. For example, the Pixel 8 Pro is unique (in the Western world, at least) in that it has three high-resolution lenses, as opposed to just one, as is the case with the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The main lens is now 50 MP, while the ultra-wide and telephoto lenses are both 48 MP. (The iPhone 15 Pro Max has a 48 MP main lens, but its ultra-wide and telephoto lenses are each just 12 MP.)

Despite this upgrade, Google has stuck with the old-school 12.5 MP default on its 50 MP main lens, an anachronistic choice given Apple’s shift to a 24 MP default on the main lens on the latest iPhone Pros. Google does let you switch between 12.5 MP and 50 MP photos on what I initially took to mean just the main lens (and between JPEG and RAW at either resolution), but I was curious if that was true of the other two lenses. And if so, whether there was a noticeable improvement in switching to the higher resolution. (I also considered the painful possibility that one or more of the lenses would work better at the lower resolution and that one or more would work better at the higher resolution, if available, a situation that could cause problems.)

And figuring that out required some testing. Here’s what I found.

First and perhaps most importantly, switching to 50 MP introduced shutter lag with each of the rear lenses, and that alone was reason enough for me to nix using that setting. One wonders if a 25 MP middle ground, similar to that offered on the iPhone 15 Pros, would do the trick. I think it would, but this also feels like something that Google’s Tensor G3 processor should handle.

Second, yes, the 50 MP setting does impact the ultra-wide and telephoto lenses too, which makes sense, given that the shutter lag is present on all three lenses. The file sizes are correspondingly humongous, too: 12.5 MP images shot with the main lens are just under 2 MB each with a resolution of 4080 x 3072, while 50 MP images are over 6.5 MB with a resolution of 8160 x 6144. The respective file sizes on the ultra-wide and telephoto lenses are similar (while the respective resolutions are, go figure, identical).

Given this, the question becomes, is there any scenario in which the much larger file sizes and slower shutter speed would justify using the 50 MP setting? Proving that would require more testing than I’m willing to perform, but I can say that, even with perfect lighting, the larger images don’t appear to offer any visual advantage, at least not any that I can see. That’s true of all three rear lenses, and so I am keeping the resolution set to 12.5 MP.

There’s more.

I don’t have a previous-generation Pixel Pro here to test side-by-side—I had to trade in my Pixel 7 Pro when I purchased the Pixel 8 Pro—but I wish I could compare the ultra-wide shots on each. The Pixel 6 Pro, you may recall, had a 12 MP ultra-wide lens with a very narrow 114-degree field of view (FOV) and no optical image stabilization (OIS), while the Pixel 7 Pro went truly ultra-wide with a 125.8-degree FOV and very little edge distortion. But the Pixel 8 Pro has a 48 MP ultra-wide lens with “autofocus” (so not true OIS, I assume) and a very similar 125.5-degree FOV as its predecessor. I feel like the edge distortion may be a tad worse (meaning, more typical and similar to that of the iPhone 15 Pro Max) and that the overall picture quality is even better, but without having the two devices together, it’s hard to be sure. This lens seems like a major upgrade overall.

Portrait mode also works a little differently now than before. The viewfinder still offers two onscreen zoom level choices, 1.5x and 2x, but the latter is now the default. I’m still trying to figure that one out, but using 2x requires you to be further from the subject, and I’m guessing I’ve manually changed it to 1.5x at least 90 percent of the time. I feel like there should be a setting in there to choose the default. But as with portrait mode on the latest iPhones, I’ve come to really like this feature and use it a lot now in all kinds of scenarios. We’ve come a long way from the iffy edge detection of early portrait mode implementations. (Plus, you can edit the level of background blur in portrait mode shots, which is an AI miracle when it works correctly. Oddly, it sometimes doesn’t work at all.)

And while I don’t shoot a lot of video, I buy into the consensus that the iPhone retains a strong lead in this category, while Pixel keeps narrowing its shortcomings with each passing generation. I have little use for personal videos, but this is an area I’d like to learn more about, especially since modern smartphones can make for terrific mobile video recorders for podcasts and other work-related use cases. So I’ll see what I can do here.

Of particular interest is the new Audio Magic Eraser feature, exposed in Google Photos, that can reduce or even eliminate distracting background noise in videos.

A quick test of me talking while the noisy clothes washing machine ran nearby in the new place today yielded impressive results: I was able to eliminate the noise with acceptable voice quality. You can check it out for yourself:

More soon.