But it's computationally intensive to show the end result in the 'viewfinder' in real-time as you're composing. The results of HDR+, the burst mode multi-frame averaging and tonemapping behind every photograph on Pixel devices, are compelling, retaining details in brights and darks in, usually, a pleasing, believable manner. But given Google's choice of lenses, its decision makes sense: from our own testing with the Pixel 3, super-res zoom is more than capable of handling zoom factors between 1x and 1.8x, the latter being the magnification factor of Google's zoomed-in lens. We're told that Google is not using the 'field-of-view fusion' technique Huawei uses on its latest phones where, for example, a 3x photo gets its central region from the 5x unit and its peripheries from upscaling (using super-resolution) the 1x capture. A 1x super-res zoom image (which you get by shooting 1x Night Sight) still only generates a 12MP image cropping and upscaling from there is unlikely to get you as good results as feeding crops to the super-res pipeline for it to align and assemble on a higher resolution grid before it outputs a 12MP final image. I'm speculating here, but I imagine much of this has to do with the ability of super-resolution techniques to generate imagery of higher resolution than any one frame. Marc emphasized that pinching and zooming to pre-compose your zoomed-in shot is far better than cropping after the fact. Have a look at what the combination of two lenses and super-res zoom gets you with these 1x to 8x full-resolution samples from Google. No doubt the extra resolution of the zoomed-in unit helps with those higher zoom ratios. Google tells us the net result is 1x-3x zoom that is on par with a true 1x-3x optical zoom, and pleasing results all the way out to 4x-6x magnification factors. New is a second 'zoomed-in' camera module with a 48mm equivalent, F2.4 lens paired with a slightly smaller 16MP sensor.

The Pixel 4 features a main camera module with a 27mm equivalent F1.7 lens, employing a 12MP 1/2.55' type CMOS sensor. As such, many of the sample images in this article were provided by Google. Note that we do not yet have access to a production-quality Pixel 4. We had the opportunity recently to sit down with Marc Levoy, Distinguished Engineer and Computational Photography Lead at Google, and Isaac Reynolds, Product Manager for Camera on Pixel, to dive deep into the imaging improvements brought to the lineup by the Pixel 4. Google yesterday announced the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, updates to the popular line of Pixel smartphones.

Pixel 3 f1 2019 image