Pixel devices are adored for their punchy images and AI-powered photo features, and today, we get treated to a pair of new phones: The Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro. Both phones have a 50-megapixel main sensor and a 12-megapixel ultrawide sensor. The Pixel 7 Pro has an additional 48-megapixel telephoto lens.
With these new flagship phones, Google is adding a bunch of photo and video features to the mix. Here’s a summary of all the new features included in the Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro:
- The company said that the new Tensor G2 cameras on the new Pixel phones reduce motion blur to make it faster to capture photos in low light. Google claims that this feature using ML-based denoising makes taking photos with Night Sight twice as fast as the previous version. It also fuses images from the ultrawide and the main camera to capture a non-steady subject like a moving baby with great details.
- Google Photos also added a new feature called Photo Unblur that will only work with the Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro.
- Google included new accessibility features with the Pixel 7, including a new Guided Frame feature to help visually impaired users take photos. It will ask users to readjust the phone’s position to get the best shot.
- The search giant said that it has partnered with image experts around the world to capture images of people with different skin tones accurately — an evolution of its Real Tone feature it launched alongside the Pixel 6 last year. It has trained its camera features like exposure and brightness with more than 10,000 images over the past year to better capture darker skin tones in low-light situations.
- There are also plenty of improvements in video capturing: The new Pixel phones have cinematic blur to create a shallow depth of field effect, for example. The new devices also have hardware- and software-powered video stabilization with better autofocus.
- Tensor G2 supports video recording in 10-bit HDR. Google has partnered with YouTube, Snap and TikTok to display these high-quality videos.
- The Pixel 7 series also comes with speech enhancement in 4K HDR at 60 fps to record clear sound as part of video capture.
- The new flagship devices from Google also have re-engineered Super Res Zoom. This is a digital zoom feature that enhanced 2x zoom from the 50-megapixel original. It reduces the resolution, which reduces the flexibility of what you can do with the photos later, but in a world where the vast majority of photos end up on Instagram or on screens, the resulting 12 mpx image is plenty.
- Plus, the Pixel 7 Pro has a dedicated telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom. If you want to zoom anywhere between 2x and 5x the devices stack the photos from the main and telephoto sensor to capture a high-quality image.
- Using pinch-to-zoom, users can take 12-megapixel photos at 10x zoom, which Google claims is as good as a dedicated telephoto camera thanks to Super Res Zoom.
- The company also introduced zoom stabilization to counter shaking of the hand while taking a photo at a zoom level of 15x or above. When you use 20x or higher zoom, Pixel 7 upscales an image using machine learning. The highest zoom level for these phones is 30x.
- The Pixel 7 Pro’s macro mode can take photos of objects up close (1 inch/3 cm) with HDR+ quality using the device’s new ultrawide lens.
