Owning a Pixel phone from Google has meant for many years that you carry one of the better smartphone cameras on the market. I feel like Google has been leading in smartphone photography since they first gave us Night Sight, but they’ve continued to improve with upgrades to sensors, processing, and in some situations, zoom.
On the Pixel 10 Pro, Google first brought out its Pro Zoom feature, which could digitally zoom up to 100x. This sounds wild for a smartphone camera to do, especially once you snapped a picture and watched it miraculously clean up the image and return something the viewfinder may not have even shown as clearly.
Well, it did that because it processes the photo with generative AI to rebuild scenes in the distance. We pointed out last year how neat this new feature was, because it was actually doing an impressive job of cleaning up images and returning something that was usable.
Of course, having your phone use generative AI to return photos has encouraged a conversation around whether or not those are actual photos or just more AI slop. In most of the samples we shared, it really was just a clean-up and we (thankfully) didn’t find the generative AI just making it all up. However, I mostly lean towards the side of those who would not consider these to be real photos. Whatever generative AI touches should be shamed, at least on some level.
I bring this all up because for the Pixel 11 Pro (our review), Google has extended Pro Zoom to 120x while still using generative AI to complete the processing and return crisper images of an object far in the distance.
Since places like reddit are now filled with people who just got their new Pixel 11 Pro phones, they are all in testing mode and showcasing their favorite parts, like the camera. It’s clear that many didn’t know that the Pro Zoom was, in a way, making up their super-zoomed photos, and that sharing them as if they were legitimate would return mockery.
The other night, we had a partial lunar eclipse and as always, people brought out their cameras, including the new Pixel 11 Pro models, to take pictures of it. They were so impressed by how crisp and clean the photos were that they ran to the internet to share. Many truly believed that their Pixel 11 Pro was the ultimate of all camera systems and that all haters should shove it.
I don’t want to point all of them out, because they’ve all been put on notice, but at least one user shared both the raw and processed images of the eclipse from their Pixel 10 Pro. This is a really great example of where Google is taking your less-than-optimal image and then turning it into something that looks professional and borderline unbelievable, thanks to AI.
This morning, it became very clear that the entire pixel_phones subreddit has decided that it needs to spend several days roasting those who didn’t know that their cameras might not be as impressive as they initially thought. There are pages and pages of posts at this point and many of them gave me a good laugh. Here are a few.
“No ai used” is perfection there.
And finally, the Pro Zoom on the Pixel 11 Pro is so good, it showed us all the Pixel 12 Pro a full year early.
The internet isn’t always bad.
