- Google announced several new camera improvements and features for the Pixel 4 during its Tuesday event.
- Some of the improvements will make photos look better, while others are helpful for the act of taking a photo.
- The biggest new feature is a dual-lens camera system. Previous Pixel phones have had only single lenses.
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Google announced its new Pixel 4 smartphones on Tuesday, though most of what was announced wasn’t really much of a surprise because of the absurd number of details leaked before the event.
Still, there were some things that weren’t as widely leaked, like the camera improvements and features Google stuffed into the Pixel 4.
Even before Tuesday, Google had the best camera in the smartphone business, and it’s still trying to make it even better.
Here’s the new camera stuff coming with the Pixel 4 when it’s released next Thursday:
The biggest change is that the Pixel 4 is the first Pixel phone to have more than one rear-facing camera. The second lens is a 2X telephoto lens.
Pixel phones have long had single-lens rear camera systems that were so good that they could do what the competition needed to do with two lenses, including taking regular and zoomed photos.
Now the competition has ramped things up, and you'll find triple-camera systems on phones like the iPhone 11 Pro, the Samsung Galaxy S10, and the OnePlus 7T. All of a sudden, phones had regular lenses, zoomed lenses, and ultra-wide lenses that are perfect for capturing more scenery or taking photos of subjects that are too close to capture in full.
Google doubled down on zooming with the Pixel 4's 2X telephoto lens instead of giving its new phone an ultra-wide lens. The Google engineer Marc Levoy said during the Pixel 4's announcement that ultra-wide lenses are "fun" but that zooming is "more useful."
Live HDR Plus shows you what your photos will look like with the Pixel's HDR Plus mode before you press the shutter button.
Google's Pixel phones, including the Pixel 4, have Google's HDR Plus for photos, where the phone takes up to nine photos at different lighting settings when you press the shutter button and combines them to make a typically great Pixel photo.
The thing that Google is addressing here is that you could never see what your photos were going to look like when a Pixel took a photo with HDR Plus.
With Live HDR Plus, you can now tell how the photo is going to turn out on the Pixel 4's screen before you tap the shutter button. Levoy described it as "WYSIWYG" - "what you see is what you get."
The new "dual exposure controls" feature lets you take creative photos that would be difficult to edit later.
The tool lets you adjust the exposure and shadows - or "tone mapping" - to take creative photos like the one Google showed off during its event (above).
It's something you'd find in a smartphone camera's "pro" camera mode, but Google has made it easy to experiment with right from the regular camera mode.
The Pixel 4 gets "truer" colors that will be especially noticeable in tricky lighting.
Google is applying its software-powered automatic white-balancing to give "truer" colors, and it'll be especially useful for tricky lighting.
Portrait mode is getting better overall.
Google is improving portrait mode on the Pixel 4 to better handle hair, pets, large objects, and subjects that are farther away.
Google is adding astrophotography to its Night Sight mode.
For the astrophotography option in Night Sight, the Pixel 4 takes 15 photos at different exposures with a 16-second shutter speed. That's to say the Pixel 4's camera takes 15 16-second-long photos at different exposures at the same time.
That's the equivalent of a four-minute shutter speed in 16 seconds, which is nuts - it's typically less than a second for regular photos.
And because the shutter speed is 16 seconds, the stars and other objects in the photo won't move as much as they would with an SLR camera set to a four-minute shutter speed.
Because the Pixel 4's astrophotography mode takes 16 seconds to take a photo, you would need a tripod to prevent moving the phone while it's taking the photo. Otherwise, everything would be blurry. At the very least, you'd need to prop the phone against something to get the best photo.