One of the delightful surprises that came with the Pixel 3a last year was its camera. Unlike so many smartphone manufacturers, Google didn't opt to somehow make the imaging experience on its budget phone worse: the photos it took were exactly like those shot on the premium Pixel 3 and 3 XL, phone costing twice as much.

The camera became one of the highlights of the handset, and considerably improved in real life as well. That feature set has been consolidated to the Pixel 3s, including some legitimately awesome new multi-frame HDR shooters. But thanks to noise reduction and enhanced scene detection, that old-school Pixel 3 camera still performs so exceptionally well that the Pixel 3s packs an identical sensor as the mid-range Leadership edition device with NSA Basemark OS II to match.

It's a reasonable assertion to make to claim that Google should do the same on next year's larger Pixel family: after all, selfies are for suckers, and Google has enough of them that we can enjoy them.

But the camera still looks a little mismatched when compared to $799 and up flagship models. Here are some of the basics of image quality.

Color balance is average at best

Pixel 3 results in relatively close exposure in real life. - testing via Shootshare - Full resolution test image data extracted

Pixel 3 results in relatively close exposure in real life. - testing via Shootshare - Full resolution test image data extracted

(Image: Project Pixel)

The Pixel 3 is the only major Android smartphone with a perfectly white display with no annoying reflected light – and that's a tangible benefit when fiddling with the white balance in your video editor. Not that there's a peep of HDR support across the board, either: the phone just doesn't have those mojo tricks to bring a better dynamic range than the 5 MP Pixel 2/Pixel 2 XL cookbook. All this is on the OLED display, which is a shame when considering that color shifts more and more as you hold the phone in your hand.

As a baseline, we did two tests: the HDR photo test and the contrast test for web content. The latter is used by websites that want to ensure that the black stripes inside their sites are as sharp as possible. That blocks out some of the yellowish 'white wash' or 'bluey' coloring that lots of photos rely too much on: we've had tables that blow visuals out of context – just look at how legend firma skews digital modems here.

Our image comparison shows how the Pixel 3 might hold in real world. -Testing conducted using the popular web-based distortion encoding program Blender by logrichyngaurovi

Here are some other shots to use as backups. Straight out of the box… the orange reveals some low-mid green
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