Paul’s Pixel 10 Diaries: Camera Deep Dive ⭐

Our trip to Berlin this past week was the ideal time to test the camera systems in the Pixel 10 series smartphones.ur trip to Berlin this past week was the ideal time to test the camera systems in the Pixel 10 series smartphones. Here’s what I experienced.
Feeds and speeds, but mostly feeds
If you visit the Google Store website, you can compare various aspects of the Pixel 10, 10 Pro, 10 Pro XL, and other recent Pixels, including, of course, the high-level specifications of their respective camera systems. This is useful for all the obvious reasons, and that’s especially true for the Pixel 10 series if camera performance and photo quality are at the top of your decision making tree.

The single biggest change in these phones, year-over-year, is arguably the addition of a third (telephoto) lens to the base Pixel. But where Google giveth, Google also taketh away: While the main (wide) lens on the base Pixel 9 and 10 are not quite identical but close enough, Google has replaced the 48 MP ultra-wide lens from the Pixel 9 with a 13 MP ultra-wide lens in the Pixel.

Some of this is surely tied to the available space in the phone, but that’s not the full story (see below): The Pixel 9 and 10 have identical dimensions. My bet is that this was mostly a cost-based decision, or what a hardware maker calls the bill of materials (BOM). As we’ve discussed, every hardware design is a series of compromises between what a customer may want and what they’re willing to pay. The best designs thread those needs successfully. Some better than others.

When it debuted, the Pixel 9 started at $799. And despite tariffs and whatever other costs, the Pixel 10 likewise starts at $799 a year later. The RAM (12 GB) and base storage (128 GB) are unchanged year-to-year, but the phones differ in other ways. The Pixel 10 has a slightly bigger battery and slim integrated magnets for the new Qi 2.2 charging functionality, for example. Those explain my caveat above about space savings, but they must incur some small additional cost as well. So I suspect that the smaller (and less capable) ultra-wide lens in the Pixel 10 is mostly a cost-related issue.

Is it a good trade-off? Almost certainly, though I don’t have a Pixel 9 to compare shots on both cameras. Even for those who don’t use a telephoto lens regularly, having one on hand is useful. And if the 13 MP ultra-wide lens delivers reasonably good shots, then there’s no harm and no foul. Pixels with bigger, more powerful camera lenses are all configured to bin shots down to a lower MP size (usually in the 14 MP range) anyway. This is a setting I’ve experimented with but now just leave on the default. My Pixel 9 Pro XL and 10 Pro XL shots are all 14 MP-ish. And they look great.

But characters on a web page don’t tell the full story.
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In previous Pixel generations, and with Pixel 10 series phone in which you zoom up to 30x, Google uses something called Super Res Zoom to make shots taken past a lens’ optical...