Google's Pixel Camera chief, Isaac Reynolds, thinks year-to-year upgrades to smartphone cameras are still critical, even though some detractors think they’re passé.
“A person who is a casual photographer and desperately wants to be a hobbyist—they're never going to break that ceiling unless you give them the tools," he says. "The features that others call ‘meh’—for some people, those features are life-changing."
Take the 30X Super Res Zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro from 2022, which uses machine learning to stitch together multiple frames in a digitally zoomed photo to give you a result that’s much sharper than you're used to. Reynolds says that because of this feature, Google now sees people using 30X zoom dramatically more than before.
The new Pixel 11 Pro, announced today, can zoom up to 120X, though in addition to the digital stitching, it relies on AI-generated pixels to fill in some details. Reynolds says maybe having that capability is enough to get someone interested in, say, wildlife photography. After experimenting on their phone, they’d be ready to invest in a professional camera and a big zoom lens.
“There's a reason I work on low light and zoom every single year," he says. "Because no matter how much I do it, when I do the user study with thousands of respondents, people always want more."
Every year, Google debuts a new Pixel phone, and every year, there's a slew of new camera tricks—largely powered by software wizardry—to deliver better photos than ever before. Last year, there was the Pro Res Zoom, which bumped up digital zoom on the Pixel 10 Pro to 100X. Two years before that, Google introduced “Add Me,” which lets two people take a group photo together without asking a stranger to take the pic for them.
For the Pixel 11 series, Google has demonstrated a handful of upgrades that can drastically alter the look of your photos, and even take some of the work out of capturing photos. Here's a closer look at a few top new camera capabilities on the Pixel 11 series.
So you want to capture a video of an important event—a concert of your favorite band, singing happy birthday to a loved one as a waiter brings a cake over, or your kid's recital. Too often, you see people holding their phone up during these milestones, trying to capture the moment, instead of being present. That's the problem Google's new Magic Capture feature is trying to solve.
This is a new mode that sits next to the Photo/Video tab in the Pixel camera app. Select Magic Capture, and it will kick off a two-minute video recording. Then, rather than keeping the phone planted in front of your face, hold or prop the phone up so it’s pointing at your subject, then ignore the phone. The idea is to let Google's Gemini artificial intelligence models capture the scene and take photos on your behalf, so you can actually pay attention to what's happening in front of you.
The result? You'll get access to the full video (it's restricted to 1080p, but anyone with a Pixel 11 Pro can use Google's Video Boost technology to bump that to 4K). More important is the handful of photos you'll get—in full quality—as if you tapped on the shutter button yourself during the best moments. Reynolds says Gemini does a remarkable job of identifying “peak” occurrences in the scene, analyzing more than 500 frames to find perfect shots you'll want in your photo library.
I gave it a whirl during a demo with some live dancers. Indeed, all I had to do was hold the phone to the side—not in my face—and after the dance was over, I looked at the camera roll and found some surprisingly well-composed shots. It even cropped images with light edits based on what Gemini thought was a better composition. It's very much reminiscent of Google's Clips, a 2018 camera that ultimately flopped but similarly used AI to capture family moments. Magic Capture feels more intentional, and perhaps more useful.
“I do think the dream is: ‘I don’t have to deal with it; AI can look at a hundred times as many frames as I can, let the models handle this,'” Reynolds says. “That is sort of the dream of so many people who refuse to take their phones out at an event because they don't want their kid to remember their face hidden behind a camera.”
Everyone knows that if you want to shoot a photo in low light, you have to stay as still as possible. Our smartphone cameras take a few seconds to capture multiple images and stitch them together, meaning small movements can end in a blurry mess. But Google says its new Tensor G6 processor on the Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL can alleviate this problem by enabling a feature called Instant Night Sight.
Instant Night Sight is 4.5 times faster than the standard Night Sight available on other Pixel phones. Yes, that means there will still be a small shutter delay as the camera captures the photo, but the delay isn’t as pronounced as before. Much of this is thanks to new image-processing models tailored for the G6 chipset, which are bolstered by engine updates to Night Sight.
There are also hardware upgrades to a few cameras on the Pixel 11 series that provide greater light sensitivity, delivering brighter images in low light. Specifically, the Pixel 11 and Pixel 11 Pro Fold have an upgraded 48-megapixel primary camera that absorbs 56 percent more light, and the new 48-megapixel telephoto camera on the Pixel 11 Pro has 30 percent more light sensitivity. It's a shame Instant Night Sight is only available to the two Pro candybar Pixels.
Like Apple is doing with its Photographic Styles, Google is ceding more control to you, the photographer, in how your photos look. The Pixel Camera now features “Camera Looks,” and there are four main pillars: Original, Natural, Shadows, and Vanilla. Natural offers “relaxed details,” whereas Vanilla has a warm, golden glow; Shadow nets you deeper contrast. These aren't just filters like the ones you slap on Instagram—they're calibrated at the sensor level, and you can see what they look like in the camera viewfinder before you tap the shutter button.
From there, you can swipe left to cycle through a handful of additional looks, like Digi, Black Tie, Minimal, Editorial, Classic, and Velvet. And within each of these, you can further customize the settings for things like brightness, contrast, and highlights to tailor the look to your taste.
“People are moving away from what Pixel pioneered 10 years ago, which was that hashtag #nofilter concept,” Reynolds says. “And now, there's a much stronger desire to personalize and be unique, and put yourself into it.”
These Camera Looks must be chosen before you take the photo—not after. Reynolds says his team found that people engage with this feature very differently when it's available before capturing the photo—they think about it another way and enjoy it more—than if it were a filter to slap on in post.
Arizona State University recently added content creation as an academic major—that's how many people really want to become influencers. So it makes sense then that Google would add some helpful tools to cater to those folks right in the camera app.
The new Creator Suite lives in the Pixel Camera's video settings. Once enabled, you can save videos to specific project folders instead of your main camera library, turn on an audio visualizer so you can make sure the microphone is actually picking up sound, enable Google's Speech Enhancement feature to beef up the video subjects’ voices, and add a social media grid so it's easy to visualize how your video will be framed on different platforms.
But arguably my favorite, as someone who has to make videos for my job, is the built-in teleprompter. You can pop any text into the feed, and it will track your speech as you talk, so the text will match your pace, meaning you never have to worry about the teleprompter’s scroll moving too fast or too slow. Naturally, you have to use the selfie camera for this capability (so you can see the screen at the same time you’re addressing the camera) but that makes the case for the Pixel 11 Pro Fold even stronger.
Reynolds highlights many other under-the-hood advances that improve the Pixel 11's cameras. For example, camera launch latency has improved up to 30 percent. Google also claims a 9 percent better power efficiency across the board. “Everything that matters to camera this year got upgraded,” Reynolds says. But here are a few other tidbits to call out.
You can read more about the new Pixel 11 series, Google Pixel Watch 5, and Pixel Tag here.
Source: Wired
