Watch out iPhone: Google wants to be the smartphone camera champ. The company just announced the Pixel and Pixel XL, a pair of new smartphones that puts a huge amount of emphasis on photography.
Developed in-house, the phones pack what Google boasts is the "best smartphone camera ever." The sensor and camera reviewing lab DxOMark seems to agree: they've given the Pixel's 12.3-megapixel rear camera a score of 89, the highest ever awarded to a smartphone camera.
By comparison, the iPhone 7 scored a 86. Here’s what the mobile leaderboard looks like now over at DxOMark:
“Simply put, the Pixel raises the bar for what is possible with a smartphone camera,” DxOMark writes in its review. “Image quality continues to improve, and the increased use of HDR+ to render scenes that have previously been difficult for small sensors such as those in smartphones broadens what is possible with these ubiquitous devices.”
“While we have reviewed other smartphone cameras that matched the Pixel’s numbers in a few categories, the Pixel is uniquely capable of capturing outstanding images under a wide variety of conditions, and is also among the best we have tested for video capture.”
The Google Pixel camera sensor has large 1.55μm pixels, and the lens features a large f/2.0 aperture. These specs help deliver “sharp, crisp images” for “great shots in any light” and “bright, even photos,” Google says. An HDR function helps assist with improving dynamic range, shooting multiple exposures and blending them after aligning pixels and removing blur.
Another strength of the Pixel camera is that it has an extremely short capture time — the shortest Google has ever tested — letting you instantly capture photos with virtually zero shutter lag.[petapixel]
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