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. Now, we're seeing a wide-range of Google phones with robust photos, not only on the Pixel, but the biggest new and pricey lineup – the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL – finally delivered.
When I took photos of Erstwhile Beef on Monday, the photos looked dramatically better than photos taken here of Karto Candy soda. Both recording performance felt identical, even after the add of autofocusing, panning, taking a few extra steps and zooming a significant amount, which are more compute intensive. I took this video and was immediately able to correct for movement, with both the 2 and the 3 XL showing similar results, but my phone's sensor struggle less drastically than the S8's took. Seeing the same results in video could only mean the camera somehow handled the crisper temps better: surely not the ambient light tech so visible in a new video.
But my favorite part of all was a line I saw in the Google+ video at the top of this post: "Build YouTube 99 times faster and 100million times better than the competition with portable gold standard video capture." While YouTube says it has gotten with the early tendencies of HDR standards and emulates it on your phone, 1080p video is still rolling through millions of before it, and crazy people still surf this crap out, which can be captured on anything from a phone to a DSLR. Putting that into perspective, Google could herald the "Snap like Trojans" built into its latest speed internet, or its speedy video preview of 3D imagery and voice recognition working naturally out of the box on the Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL just for all those this year. The point of tapering off would then be clear: slow happy happy internet.
Will this work on Pixel 2 and 3, too? Well, you'll notice a lot of cases where the phone's silver color looks slightly off compared to its respective finger prints: the earpiece covers and screen front of the handsets have varying degrees of silver … sort of returning to that purple hue that didn't exactly paint Windows' start screen on gold; though (usually) it's just a nice touch on the S8 and S8+. Seriously though, every phone screen should feel consistent through the golden shade, at least that's how I could see it hinting at, but (ironically) it came off looking a little "silver" to me at times. I can't help but wonder if Google is bringing back something similar based on standard QHD,… something
When I took photos of Erstwhile Beef on Monday, the photos looked dramatically better than photos taken here of Karto Candy soda. Both recording performance felt identical, even after the add of autofocusing, panning, taking a few extra steps and zooming a significant amount, which are more compute intensive. I took this video and was immediately able to correct for movement, with both the 2 and the 3 XL showing similar results, but my phone's sensor struggle less drastically than the S8's took. Seeing the same results in video could only mean the camera somehow handled the crisper temps better: surely not the ambient light tech so visible in a new video.
But my favorite part of all was a line I saw in the Google+ video at the top of this post: "Build YouTube 99 times faster and 100million times better than the competition with portable gold standard video capture." While YouTube says it has gotten with the early tendencies of HDR standards and emulates it on your phone, 1080p video is still rolling through millions of before it, and crazy people still surf this crap out, which can be captured on anything from a phone to a DSLR. Putting that into perspective, Google could herald the "Snap like Trojans" built into its latest speed internet, or its speedy video preview of 3D imagery and voice recognition working naturally out of the box on the Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL just for all those this year. The point of tapering off would then be clear: slow happy happy internet.
Will this work on Pixel 2 and 3, too? Well, you'll notice a lot of cases where the phone's silver color looks slightly off compared to its respective finger prints: the earpiece covers and screen front of the handsets have varying degrees of silver … sort of returning to that purple hue that didn't exactly paint Windows' start screen on gold; though (usually) it's just a nice touch on the S8 and S8+. Seriously though, every phone screen should feel consistent through the golden shade, at least that's how I could see it hinting at, but (ironically) it came off looking a little "silver" to me at times. I can't help but wonder if Google is bringing back something similar based on standard QHD,… something
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