Steve Litchfield

It remains a mystery to me to this day. Why don't other phone manufacturers and their cameras use the tricks that Google pulls off? An issue of patents perhaps? Or just lack of software expertise? Regardless, the two 'tricks' demonstrated here are Sensor Fusion and Super Res Zoom. You'll find them on any Pixel in various combinations. On the Pixel 7 and 8 Pro and on the Pixel Fold (below) you'll find both techniques employed. And yes, I already said that most people don't need to zoom more than 3x in normal life , but hey - this is for when zoom is needed. Perhaps at a sporting event or trying to spot rare wildlife. To demonstrate both tricks, let's take a standard landscape shot - with an interesting central subject: So far so good, and any camera phone could take this shot. Here scaled for the web, but don't worry, I'll show off some crops below too. Now we try zooming at 2x: In the case of my Pixel Fold, the main sensor is 48MP, so a 2x zoom smart...

Long time readers of my scribblings on camera phones will know my passion for photos to be captured as they look in reality, not in some high contrast, over-saturated, edge-enhanced version of reality. Sure, the latter look better on 6" phone screens. That's why these trends have become common. But the photos themselves are terrible in terms of image quality. By which I mean they've been messed around to look great on the phone or embedded in a narrow social web feed but you can't do anything else with them. Say you want to use a section of the photo only, cropping in to a group of people or an object in a scene. Or you want to show the photo on a large desktop display or TV. Good luck with that with a photo grabbed at 12MP on an iPhone or Pixel or Samsung flagship with all default settings. You'll see artefacts, jagged borders where there should be none, and general 'over-processing'. Which is why I applauded Nokia's 'PureView' approach ten yea...