For many people, the camera is the most important feature of any new phone. Luckily, there are plenty of great options for phones with great cameras, and while some are slightly better than others, nearly every new Android phone can take great photos.
We hear it all the time – manufacturers tell us about camera advancements and features, and then reviews break them down. This makes sense because technology advances. But last week, it hit me in the face and I was honestly surprised.
Android & Calm
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In a very niche way, my laziness showed me how great the camera on the Pixel 7 Pro is in a very strange way.
I love aquariums; they keep me out of trouble. most. Anyway, I was trying to sell some small pieces of coral online and someone sent me a quick message about a specific piece of coral. They asked me for a photo so they could know what they wanted to buy.
Taking photos of coral is really difficult, even with a “professional” camera, because the light encourages the coral to grow. Corals require specific wavelengths of light, and they can grow like plants, converting light into energy. Our eyes don’t need much light to see the coral, but it certainly interferes with the camera.
This science fiction photo from the Galaxy Z Flip 5 doesn’t do much good as it looks nothing like what your eyes see. Most of the time, you’ll get similar results if you point your phone at the aquarium while the actinic lamp is on. We can’t see it, but the camera sensor is flooded by the amount of UV rays flooding into the lens.
You can counteract it by using a UV lens filter, like a kit designed for smartphones. The science behind this is that the filter will filter out light at 15k and 20k Kelvin (think ultra-blue light that washes out everything else) while retaining the rest of the light data. The result is a photo that looks very much like what our eyes see, without all the UV interference.
I didn’t bother to find my little phone filter kit, so I just pointed the Pixel 7 Pro at the aquarium and took a photo. To my surprise I got this using Google’s automatic settings.
It’s still a weird photo, but it looks a lot like what my eyes saw. Just a few years ago, this would have been impossible. Even cooler, it can do the same thing with videos.
I was able to take a lot of fish tank photos with the Pixel 7 Pro, but not all of them were useful. I can also occasionally get useful photos from other phones. I’ve played with it enough that I can confidently say that if you take a photo without any “white” light, Google has found some ways to make it work through computational photography.
While improved lenses play a role, the real magic lies in using software to “make” images. Smartphones utilize powerful processors and sophisticated software to improve image quality beyond what the sensor alone can capture. Technologies like HDR (High Dynamic Range) combine multiple exposures to achieve balanced lighting, while noise reduction algorithms eliminate graininess in low-light photos.
In my case, the result wasn’t a great photo – it was grainy, had a lot of noise, and you’d see weird artifacts in places where I needed to clean the glass. But it expresses what you’re seeing very well, removes the background glow, and is very consistent.
I don’t know what software magic is used to turn the light that our eyes can’t see into an accurate representation of the real thing, because in this case, the “real” changes too much. Adding some white lighting makes it easier to take photos, but will slightly change the colors you see since nothing glows like a black light poster.
All I know is that my year-old phone takes photos of difficult subjects just as well, if not better, than my expensive “real” camera, which doesn’t use voodoo logic and artificial intelligence in place of a good, fast lens . I wish I had a Pixel 8 here to test because I know it performed much better than expected when taking photos at a public aquarium.
Cell phone cameras have transcended the standard of “good enough” and are now true professional tools. Just a few years ago, I would never have imagined something like this would happen, but I was ready to put my bigger, heavier camera on the shelf.