Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How Google’s Pixel cameras have changed – Pixel 1 vs Pixel 5 compared!”.
Okay, so it’s been a little over four years since the original google pixel came out and over four generations, you’d probably expect to see some major shifts in the technology, and i mean by and large we have seen some pretty major shifts. I mean look at the difference between these two phones, there’s, obviously a big change between the pixel 1 and the pixel 5.. But you know what i’m particularly interested in is google’s camera improvements every single year, google kind of blew us away with some magical software feature that came out of the camera. But again that was almost all software and by and large the google pixel’s hardware hasn’t really changed that much over the last four years. The pixel 5 is using a 12.2 megapixel sony imx 363 sensor, which is actually the same sensor that was used in the pixel 4 and the pixel 3., and none of those sensors are that different from the 12.3 inch sony imx 378. That was used in the pixel one, so i do really think that google needs to update the hardware in their smartphones.
I actually made a separate video about that up here if you want to check that out, but i kind of wanted to see the difference between the original google pixel software build and the pixel 5 and kind of see how the images came out different. So my friend david cogan, let me an original pixel one on the original software build. So this is the camera as you got it when you bought it out of the box and then i’ve got a pixel 5 on the latest software build. So we’re going to go through a few images and just check out how exactly software has made these cameras different all right.
So this first image here is me standing right next to the christmas tree against a very backlit scene, and the first thing you’re probably going to notice here – is the detail that you can see outside of the window. Now the pixel 5 was able to retain a lot more of that highlight detail, and it also brought the shadows up in my skin tone in the tree, whereas the pixel one definitely has a lot more contrast, and with that contrast comes a little bit more blown Out highlights now, over the last four years, manufacturers have really pushed to make the dynamic range on cameras a lot better and google was able to do this, mainly through software, which is honestly really surprising. I mean you can see the cloud detail outside on the pixel 5 image, whereas the pixel 1 image is just totally blown out now. There are aspects about the pixel 1 image that i still do really like. Obviously, the tree is a little more contrasty.
The whole image is just more contrasty in general and i think a lot of people are going to like that. But if you want to tweak the images later or you just want a lot more high, dynamic range, pixel 5 is definitely beating out the pixel one. Here, okay, so in this next image, this room was quite dark. This is one of my camera collections and it was a really really dark room and i kind of just wanted to see how the automatic night modes would kind of like make.
This photo. Look better. Now the pixel one doesn’t actually have a night mode, so the pixel one image that you can see here is straight out of the camera uh. One thing that you can kind of notice is that the pixel one image has some pretty soft areas. If you compare the pixel one to the pixel 5 here, the detail is really muddy in the pixel one and that’s because it had to bump up the iso quite a bit, whereas the pixel 5 automatically kicked in night mode. So you can see a lot more detail in the different cameras.
You can read the text better overall, it’s a lot more clear now. One thing that i did notice was that the white balance skewed a little bit more towards magenta in the night mode of the pixel 5, whereas the pixel ones automatic just straight shutter image is a little bit more green and generally, when you do a longer exposure Or you up to iso, you get a little bit of a hue shift here, i’m not really sure which was more accurate in the original image, but i think that i generally overall definitely like the pixel 5 image a lot more here. So that’s a pretty big jump for the pixel 5..
Okay. Now with this photo, this is a little bit different. This kind of really dramatically shows the difference in color profile that you’re getting between the two images.
The pixel 1 definitely has a little bit more color. It’S a little bit more saturated and punchy, whereas the pixel 5 is kind of going for this more neutral, generalized, perfectly good white balance approach. You can actually see the difference in the building here, it’s more yellow in the pixel one, where it’s more neutral in the pixel 5 and even in the grass weeds itself. The pixel 1 is more yellow, whereas the pixel 5 is kind of this more. Like neutral gray color, i think the pixel one definitely represented the actual scene, a little bit better, but the pixel 5 image is going to be a little bit more flat because i think google just wanted to retain more dynamic range, wanted to give people a little Bit more control over their images, but this image is kind of showing what people mean when they say that modern cameras are kind of forcing too much dynamic range. Nowadays i mean, i overall think the pixel 1 image actually looks a little bit better, but there are probably some people who will like the flatter image of the pixel 5 too. All right, so i took this photo in a pretty dark room and the main source of light was all these little light beams around here now. The first thing you’ll, probably notice, is that the hdr in the pixel 5 is definitely better. It captured the highlights that are blown out directly at those lights. A little bit more. You can see they’re blooming a little bit more in the pixel 1 image, but i actually think i might like the white balance in the pixel one, a little bit more than pixel 5., the pixel 5 kind of tended to skew towards this bronze color in the Ceiling, whereas the pixel one kind of retains that and then there’s also a few blown highlights in the pixel 1, whereas the pixel 5 definitely did a little bit of those highlights better, the dynamic range is captured a little bit better. Overall, i would say it’s the hdr and the pixel 5.
That’S definitely better. However, again some people might like how the pixel 1 renders that kind of image all right. So in this set of images i kind of just wanted to show the effect of super red zoom, so these first images are just shot at 1x and then the second set of images is shot at about 5x.
Now, in the pixel 3, google said that it was able to use ai to kind of upscale images that were cropped in with zoom. That way, it didn’t actually have to give you like a telephoto camera and again we don’t have a telephoto camera in the pixel 5. We got it in the pixel 4, but because super resume is theoretically pretty good, we don’t really need it as much now.
This was actually kind of surprising to me because i zoomed in about 5x on both phones. Now, interestingly, the pixel one doesn’t actually show you the multiplier that it’s zooming in on when you’re, when you’re actually zooming in so i kind of have to guess. But i actually kind of think that the pixel 1 image looks a little bit better here and i’m not sure if that’s exactly just the color or what. But honestly it looks like.
It has a little bit more detail, which is kind of surprising to me. Pixel 1 image doesn’t have super resume. The color is a little bit more neutral.
I think the pixel 5 image is definitely trying to get that better color out of the image, and i would probably agree that that is a more pleasing image for most people. The white balance is a little bit better, but again the pixel 1 image here did a pretty good job without super red zoom, which was pretty surprising to me. Okay.
So after looking at those images, i was pretty surprised how close these phones are in terms of image quality. I think pretty much. What happened is that when google released the pixel 5 and all of its algorithms, everyone was so far behind. I mean google just led the pack for years and years and years, and then they didn’t really change a lot about the physical aspect of the camera. They just kind of added new software features that allowed you to take images in a wider variety of scenarios. So you’ve got night sight which allows you to take images at night time and then you’ve got astra mode and super resume and all these things that basically just make it easier for you to have a point and shoot camera that you can take really solid photos Of most of the time, but without a pretty significant hardware change in the pixel camera, it’s pretty clear that other manufacturers are starting to catch up. Google was definitely ahead of the curve in using ai machine learning and algorithms to make its camera processing way better and basically cheap physics.
But now almost every single manufacturer is using very similar processes and their cameras are getting really really close to the pixel. If not slightly better, i still think the pixel is one of the best cameras on the market today, but it’s pretty much in line with a ton of other flagships. At this point, usually when google would release a new pixel like the pixel 2, 3, 4 5. It kind of released a new software camera feature that blew your mind like astrophotography mode, like being able to cancel out sodium vapor light like portrait mode, i mean porsche mode, was a huge deal back then, and google’s been able to do it really effectively, since it Only had one camera, but google definitely needs new hardware if it wants to get in front of the game again, because if it doesn’t get in front of the game really soon, they’re gon na pretty quickly start to fall behind all right guys. Well thanks for sticking with me, let me know what you think about these cameras down in the comment section down below make sure you stay tuned, because we’ve got a few more videos coming for the remainder of 2020.
until next time catch you in the next article .