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.

Zoom

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 capabilities look better. For still images, Super Res Zoom is a computational photography feature that uses AI to stitch together elements from multiple shots to create a single, finished shot. In my experience with a Pixel 9 Pro XL, it was reliably excellent up to about 20x, but often usable up to 30x as well.

Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL provide a new computational photography feature called Pro Res Zoom to handle zoom from 30x to 100x. Pro Res Zoom uses generative AI, the Tensor G5’s image signal processor (ISP), and a new on-device Gemini Nano model to generate details in images that would otherwise be blurry, blotchy, or whatever. So it is literally creating content that the AI believes is correct for the subject you’re capturing. As with all AI, this can be hit or miss. But in my (so far somewhat limited) experience, this is a major advance over Super Res Zoom. I’m still trying to figure out if there is a point at which it stops being generally reliable, but for now, I’ll say it’s likely somewhere around 70x, with the understanding that light, hand shake, and other factors matter too.

The language is a little iffy here, but all smartphone cameras have some optical zoom capability, which is usually 1x. Telephoto lenses go further, of course, and on the Pixel 9/10 Pros, it’s 5x. If you zoom about the optical zoom limit on any lens, you’re using digital zoom. And if there is some on-device image processing, which there is today on every new or modern smartphone, we might call that hybrid zoom, some combination of the lens’ optical and digital zoom capabilities. So Super Res Zoom and Pro Res Zoom could perhaps be described as hybrid zoom to further simplify any discussion about the cameras. Maybe.

If you go back to that Pixel comparison page on the Google Store website, you can see that the base Pixel 10 has a 10.8 MP telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom that supports Super Res Zoom up to 20x. The Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL each use the same 48 MP telephoto lens, also with 5x optical zoom. But these phones support Pro Res Zoom up to 100x. Based on what I’ve seen so far, they use Super Res Zoom up through 29x, and then all shots at 30x to 100x use generative AI to fill in missing information and generate a clearer image that (hopefully, and usually) looks pretty incredible.

There is one other bit of language to get by. Google claims that all three Pixel 10 series phone can take “optical quality” shots at 0.6x (ultra-wide), 1x (main/wide), 5x (telephoto), and 10x (telephoto), The first three of those zoom levels maps directly to the three lenses in each camera system. But 10x is interesting. 10x relies on cropping a larger image (48 MP on the Pixel 10, 50 MP on the Pros) down to a smaller size. So this isn’t pixel binning, but it is digital zoom, as this image comes off the main (wide) lens. I assume Super Res Zoom is involved as well, so its computational photography using AI, but not generative AI. Like Pro Res Zoom, this assumes you’ve not configured the camera to take shots at 48/50 MP; I believe this only works with the default 14 MP-ish shots.

My takeaway from this is that the 10x “optical quality” term is Google being a bit more conservative than me when it comes to taking reliably good zoom shots. That is, you can reasonably expect zoom up to 10x to work well. But in my experience, it’s better than that, as noted.

From theory to reality

I took the base Pixel 10 and the Pixel 10 Pro XL to Berlin this past week. And while I used the bigger XL daily, with my Google Fi eSIM and phone number, I wanted to spend at least some time comparing the camera systems out in the world. This work isn’t complete—I need more time with ultra-wide shots, in particular—but I did capture some shots off the phones’ main and telephoto lenses of the same scenes, day and night, for comparison purposes.

The high-level conclusion is that the Pixel 10 Pro XL (and, thus, the Pixel 10 Pro as well, since the camera hardware is identical) takes better pictures, as one would expect. But this often isn’t obvious unless you magnify the respective images and compare them side-by-side.

Main lens at 1x

This first example is an outdoor shot of a restaurant in Berlin in daylight, taken with the main lens on the Pixel 10 at 1x. The original is 4000 x 3000, or about 12 MP. The meta-data tells me that it was shot with an ISO of 42, which is very low (because the scene was so bright), with a focal length of 5 mm, an f-stop (aperture) of f/1.7, and no digital zoom. It’s 3.85 MB in size.

Here’s a nearly identical shot taken with the Pixel 10 Pro XL. This one is a bit bigger, at 4080 x 3072, or about 12.5 MP. The ISO is even lower, 19, most likely because the Pixel 10 Pro XL’s main lens is bigger and can take in more light. It has a focal length of 7 mm, but the same f/1.7 f-stop (aperture) and no digital zoom. It’s a bit bigger on disk at 4.04 MB.

Viewed like this, these two photos are nearly identical if you can overlook me not framing them exactly the same. But the visual quality difference can be seen by magnifying the images. If you examine the bush in the front, the text on the glass, the rivets on the building frame, or whatever else, you can see that the Pixel 10 shot (top) is not as clear as the Pixel 10 Pro XL shot (bottom).

10x zoom

This second example was taken from the same location, but looking in the opposite direction, this time at an outdoor menu display stand. Here, I zoomed in to 10x with both phones, so these are Super Res Pro shots. And I held the phones in a portrait orientation.

The Pixel 10 version is 3000 x 4000, of course, with a focal length of 14 mm, an ISO of 70 (still very low), a f/3 f-stop (aperture) that tells me the telephoto lens was engaged, and a reported digital zoom of 4.43. Here, you can see the original on the left with a magnification of the text area on the right.

The Pixel 10 Pro XL version is 3072 x 4080 with a focal length of 18 mm, an ISO of 620 (which I assume is an attempt to compensate for my hand shaking), an f/2.8 f-stop (aperture) that again indicates we’re on the telephoto lens, and a reported digital zoom of 4.3.

So this one is curious. To my eyes, the photos look similar when viewed normally, but text in the shot taken with the base Pixel 10 is clearer when magnified. I can’t explain that, but it may be tied to the ISO, where the higher value from the Pro XL shot indicates less light taken in. Perhaps my hand was just moving more for whatever reason.

30x zoom and Pro Res Zoom

When you zoom in on a subject at 30x or higher with the Pixel 10 Pro/Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom kicks in. Because this uses generative AI, Google labels these photos with a “Pro Res Zoom” label in the Photos app and lets you toggle between the original and the generative final shot. It also tags these photos with a Content Credentials watermark that reads, “Edited with AI tools.”

So that’s an interesting comparison.

I took this shot in portrait mode, but I cropped both of the outputted files to landscape so you can see the detail a bit better. Here’s the final, Pro Res Zoom-enhanced final shot.

And here’s the original, which I assume still uses Super Res Zoom. That’s AI, of course, but it’s not generative AI that invents content, so this doesn’t get a Content Credentials “Edited with AI tools” watermark; it wasn’t “edited,” it is instead a composite of two or more shots taken in burst mode.

Here, the differences are stark: The Pro Res Zoom version of the photo is clearly superior, with crisper text and design elements.

More Pro Res Zoom

But is Pro Res Zoom always better? Obviously, no. Typically, it’s worked very well, in my opinion. But here’s one example of the AI making incorrect assumptions about the subject and generating something that’s incorrect. It looks pretty good, of course, but there’s a mistake here if you know what to look for.

This is the Siegessäule monument—or Victory Column—in the center of the Großer Tiergarten park in Berlin. It faces roughly west, but we were approaching it from the east, so this is the back of the monument, not the front. This day was cloudy, and while I don’t recall the exact zoom level, I believe it was in the 60 to 70x range. Here’s a 1x shot for comparison.

When I magnify the zoom shot (and this was true across several similar photos of this monument), I can see what appears to be a face … on the back of the angel’s head. The AI determined this was a human shape, I guess, and just added a face because that must be there. But it’s not what’s there.

So yes, hilarious. But if you look at the original version of this shot, the one without Pro Res Room, you can see how little it had to work with. Honestly, even with the subtle mistake, the final shot is still impressive.

Here’s another example where Pro Res Zoom moves the needle nicely on zoom quality. We were out one night, coincidentally in almost exactly the same place I took the Victory Column shots above, and could see a full or nearly full moon to the south. So my wife and I both took a few shots of the scene, me with the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro XL and my wife with her Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

The Pixel 10 zooms up to 20x, so that’s all I had to work with. The resulting shots were terrible. Here’s the best one.

I took different shots at different zoom levels with the Pixel 10 Pro XL. Here’s one at 30x, with the original on the left and the Pro Res Zoom final shot on the right.

And here’s another version at a higher zoom level.

To me, that’s pretty impressive. But suffice to say that my wife’s photos were still better: Samsung explicitly programs its camera AI to recognize the moon, so the resulting shots are “fake” in the sense that the moon bits are 100 percent generated. Whatever. This is clear, with no light auras, and it’s precisely what someone taking this shot wants to see.

There’s more to come

I still have more camera testing to do, of course. But my initial disappointment with the incredibly minor camera system hardware updates in the Pixel 10 Pro/Pro XL were quickly offset by the software- and AI-based improvements. And while some may fret over the step back with the ultra-wide camera in the base Pixel, the addition of a telephoto lens—with 5x optical zoom, no less, the same as with the Pro models—is a major step forward. So it’s still a net win.

So far, anyway. As noted, I have more testing to do. But as I write this, I’m about 10 days into my Pixel 10 series adventures. All the reviews of these phones that have been published to date were written after a week or less of testing. I’m not sure how anyone could somehow review three different phones in that short timeframe. But that’s the world we live in.

More soon.