Pixel smartphone camera review: At the top

I just can&#x27;t help but notice all phone cameras right now are incredibly close in quality, and the differences don&#x27;t really matter anymore. The software experience has become the only important thing.<p>There&#x27;s an easy explanation for it too. Pretty much every single high-end phone released in the last two years uses a Sony sensor. They completely dominate the smartphone sensor market right now.

I have no doubt about quality of camera. I somehow can not shake off this feeling, that despite top of the line components and Google software, the iPhone comparable pricing will limit its market to very small size.<p>The only successful hardware by Google is chromecast which is very cheap to buy. So ~$650 price of phone despite having best camera does not seem attractive enough. It does not have cutting edge custom components like e.g. TPU etc which I wonder would make its price lot more palatable.

One of the things not mentioned in the article is the support from Google photos. Storage space is now unlimited, and files are uploaded full res, which they didn&#x27;t do before. If you take a lot of pictures, this makes life so easy. Plus the image search- you can find that picture of a dog catching a frisbee you took 6 months ago just by asking. Everyone seems to be burnt out on novel new technology, but this is amazing to me.<p>The camera&#x27;s performance is impressive, but to me Google Photos is the biggest differentiator.

Will this phone be discontinued and unsupported after two years like other Google phones though? I&#x27;ve owned a Nexus 4, a Nexus 5 and now a 5X, I think they&#x27;re very good phones, but the fact that the Nexus 5 I bought 2 years ago won&#x27;t ever see the light of Nougat is extremely annoying. I wish Google at least pretended to care about their older lines of phones (which are not cheap phones either, the Nexus 5 cost me about 500 euros when I bought it).

I know this is slightly OT on this topic as it&#x27;s about cameras but...<p>I&#x27;m genuinely not sure what to do now. My Nexus 6 has a crack in its screen, which is expensive to replace, so I was looking at a new phone. Google were supposed (dammit), supposed to release a new phone with cutting edge software, almost-flagship hardware and at a mid-market price. Instead they&#x27;ve gone straight for the high end of the market, and they&#x27;ve made the screens smaller, and not included wireless charging, something I&#x27;ve grown to like a lot.<p>So now my choices seem to be a galaxy note 7 (I prefer vanilla android), or... That&#x27;s about it for phones with a good size, good res display that support QI. Without QI there&#x27;s the P9 Plus and Oneplus 3, but both have comparatively low res screens. The moto Z has no QI, the LG V20 hasn&#x27;t surfaced yet... Is there another phablet that can tick all the boxes?

dxomark has published their iphone 7 review, but the 7 plus camera review is still pending.<p>Still very looks like a very impressive camera. The biggest drawback I see from phone cameras now is shutter lag and just how long it takes to get the camera app ready to take pictures. I hope Google has this nailed now.

Why are all of the example photos so horribly downsized and compressed? The picture of the Eiffel Tower is only 920 × 690. That&#x27;s laughable compared to the 12.3 megapixels it should be. If you&#x27;re reviewing image quality, you should give the readers the original files captured by the camera.<p>There&#x27;s no way readers can say anything definitive about Pixel&#x27;s camera quality without real data.

As a hobbiest photographer, this measurebating&#x2F;pixel peeping is very reminiscent of the MP wars in Digital Cameras and dSLRs.<p>Photos from mobile phones will be most often viewed on a service (FB, Instagram, Whatsapp) which will almost always do some sort of resizing and recompression which would render that +&#x2F;- 5 spread between all the top cell phones meaningless.

Really surprised that the Pixel does not have OIS. This seems unreasonable at the flagship price level.

I wish I could use a smartphone camera for everything, but none of them offer depth-of-field control, which makes them unsuitable for portraits. Their tiny pinhole lenses make it practically impossible. One can fake bokeh in software, but it&#x27;s not the same.

Do people really like that aliased look? Every picture has very obvious aliasing. It&#x27;s the first thing I noticed, within less than a second. And aliasing is an especially bad artifact because image processing algorithms assume band-limited data. There&#x27;s no way to get something natural looking from those images.<p>It seems almost unbelievable to me that a camera supposedly focused on quality would do this, so I wonder if DXOMark, despite claiming to be &quot;The reference for image quality&quot;, actually destroyed image quality with terrible downscaling. I know people like sharpness, but if you insist on pushing it this far, ringing is far less objectionable than aliasing.

Does the video stabilization work even in 4K, or only with lower resolution?<p>In the affirmative, how can the camera effectively stabilize the video since the sensor resolution (4K) is almost the same as the video resolution?

A lot of the comments on the linked site, are disappointed (shall we say) at lack of night photographs, as they believe it is the low light conditions that the new iPhones are really quite impressive (so claiming the Pixel is #1 annoys them).<p>For the record, I&#x27;ve never owned an iPhone, and am very interested in seeing how the Pixel works out, but I just thought I&#x27;d mention the comments in case anyone had missed them..!

Take a picture of a sunset.<p>So far none of the cell phones even come close to looking like the real thing. Reds look yellow...<p>My wife&#x27;s SLR does a good job of capturing it, but not our cells phones.

I feel like I&#x27;ve seen the striking building on the left before. Does anyone know what it is?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dxomark.com&#x2F;var&#x2F;ezwebin_site&#x2F;storage&#x2F;images&#x2F;media&#x2F;images&#x2F;exposure-and-contrast-90-__920&#x2F;152560-1-eng-US&#x2F;Exposure-and-Contrast-90-__920.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dxomark.com&#x2F;var&#x2F;ezwebin_site&#x2F;storage&#x2F;images&#x2F;medi...</a>

I sure hope all androids will be able to utilize the Camera app new gyro video stabilization feature

If the Pixel came out with the dual camera like the iPhone Plus and was cheaper I would seriously consider switching

how does the auto HDR fail to trigger once in a while? The auto HDR should be enabled while the camera app is open.

no optical image stabilization in a flagship? laughable.

Still has an AMOLED screen and not an IPS, dang.

This is awesome

Meta comment: Interesting that the site (dxomark.com) has the tagline &quot;The reference for image quality&quot; does not use retina images.

I am surprised that of all the companies to come out with a better camera than the latest iPhone is Google!

Uh my, that girl with the color chart... looking like: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kultur-online.net&#x2F;files&#x2F;zoom&#x2F;02_Terror-(Hanns-Martin-Sch.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kultur-online.net&#x2F;files&#x2F;zoom&#x2F;02_Terror-(Hanns-Martin-...</a><p>more serious: if you compare automatic white balance you have to have the same framing for all shots!

Anyone know how you can now submit duplicate links to HN? I thought that would redirect to the old submission? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=laktak" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;submitted?id=laktak</a>)

Apple has clearly lost its prior decisive lead in camera quality. I wonder how and why, and what apples comment on these results would be.<p>On paper, the google pixel should have inferior results, given its slower lens (f2.0 vs f1.8 on the iPhone and f1.7 on the s7). Yet they apparently are superior.<p>All modern high end smartphone cameras use the same sensors (Sony) with different lenses. Did google achieve this through better software? Or better hardware? Hardware seems unlikely given that both Samsung and Apple likely have much larger budgets and a longer knowledge history.<p>I just ordered an iPhone 7 plus because of the camera, and this is clearly making me question whether this was the right choice.

The camera sensor seems to be the same one as the one they put last year in the Nexus 6p and 5x, but the new phones have gotten a major upgrade in image processing performance and in software. They also benefit from a new gyroscope that&#x27;s used for seemingly very good video stabilization (not clear if it&#x27;s used for still photos as well). Oh, and it has a faster shutter speed.<p>Hopefully next year they use an f&#x2F;1.8 or wider aperture, too.