Google Pixel 7 (Pro) - Milestone in Computational Photography?

[12:06 Mon,10.October 2022 by Rudi Schmidts]

It is certainly advisable - if you really have good reasons to shoot with a smartphone - to keep up to date with new technologies beyond the iPhone.

Especially because Google itself is both the manufacturer of the Android platform and one of the dominating market forces in the field of AI, one can take a closer look when another Google Pixel smartphone comes onto the market. Like the Pixel 7 in various versions.

As a camera replacement, the Pixel 7 Pro is certainly the most interesting model, but with prices starting at 899 euros, it is no bargain. In return, you get three mechanically unstabilised camera sensors that cover a wide range of focal lengths with 50MP Quad Bayer main camera, 48MP telephoto and 12MP wide-angle.

With the AI-supported "Super Res Zoom" feature, Google wants to achieve an almost optical quality of a zoom lens for the first time through "computational imaging". This gives the simple Pixel an 8x zoom function, the Pixel 7 Pro even a 30x zoom magnification in the photo range. Since it says in the small print that this function does not work with every subject, this probably means that an AI adds many details as it sees fit.

Thanks to AI, you should even be able to improve blurred photos afterwards using "Photo Unblur". Although this is a post-production effect, it will only be available in the Google Photos app on the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro for the time being. According to Google, even old pictures from the archive can be improved with it. And here, too, Google points out that Photo Unblur may not work with all image elements. In other words, what the AI does not know, will not be restored.

As far as we can tell, all these functions are only available for photography, while moving images are not yet supported - probably because of the necessary computing power. Nevertheless, there are two video features to admire:

The AI-optimised skin tone rendering "Real Tone" which is supposed to provide more authenticity in the depiction of coloured people with more than 10,000 additional portraits of coloured people - even in poor lighting.

And Cinematic Blur, which is a synthetic bokeh that is supposed to be possible with up to 4K/60p in-camera. However, the first

unofficial demos of this feature cannot yet convince us one hundred percent. It&s a pity, because we would have expected a bit more AI magic from Google, after the public AI development has moved into completely new realms in the last few months...

more infos at bei blog.google

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