Google Pixel 4: Astrophotography Mode Review By Lonely Speck

Everyone mean Norman from lonely speck, and today I want to talk about the Google Pixel macrophotography mode. We recently got to try out the new Google Pixel for and test out its macrophotography mode at Joshua, Tree, National Park and Mojave National Preserve. The idea of macrophotography on a phone isn't completely new I, actually wrote an article in 2015 about how I used a smartphone to photograph the Milky Way. So the technology was possible then, but it definitely wasn't good enough to really be a marketable feature of a smartphone, but with the new Google Pixel 4 and some updates to the pixel 3 and 3a the developers that Google actually think that its capability with macrophotography is good enough to actually market it as a feature of the phone. So let's dive right in and take a look at what I was able to get with the Google Pixel for the first shots that I made on the phone were actually really, really impressive. The fainter part of the Milky Way around the summer triangle was actually nicely visible, and I was really surprised by how much detail there was in the foreground of the image now.

Obviously, this is really impressive for a phone, but of course, I wanted to do a comparison between it and my full-size camera at the Sony a7s. So for comparison, this is a photo shot on my Sony, a7s at 18 millimeters and then cropped in order to match the same field of view of the Google Pixel for roughly about 28 millimeters I also shot at f/4 to closely resemble what you would get on a typical APC DSLR, something like canon rebel compared to the full-size camera. The photo put out by the Google Pixel 4 is actually really impressive, at least on initial glance. If we look a little closer, we can definitely see that the photo shot on the Google Pixel 4 is not a sharp and the colors definitely aren't quite as good in the few days that I shot with the Google Pixel 4. This is definitely what I came to expect from the shots.

They definitely weren't. Quite as sharp as what you would expect from a full-size camera from what I've read about this phone on the Google developers blog and how the autofocus works in a pixel for actually takes a couple of pre-exposure focus check photos. It takes a couple of photos at different focal distances and then tries to compare those to figure out where the best focal distance is for that particular shot in general. It works fairly well, but I never found that it achieved perfect, pinpoint focus on the stars, but of course this might be due to some limitations with the optics that they have in the phone. One of the things that we definitely can't ignore about the Google Pixel 4 is that it's macrophotography mode is completely automatic.

All you need to do is select the nitrite mode and press the shutter, and then the phone automatically focuses exposes, aligns stacks and processes up to four minutes of exposure. So in the amount of time that it took me to shoot one photograph on the Google Pixel I could have shot about 16 separate photographs on my full-size camera. So that's an important thing to consider when thinking about what the shooting experience is like on the Google Pixel, for when using its macrophotography mode, there's, basically no manual controls other than a couple of sliders for brightness and some very limited options for focus, but in general, I actually found that most of the best results that I got out of the phone were when I didn't mess around with any of these different controls. So, if you're looking for a smartphone camera, that gives you a lot of creative control, things like white balance and shutter time, the Google Pixel 4 is definitely not that camera. But ultimately the fact that the Google Pixel 4 is completely automatic is one of the things that I actually like about it most.

It's designed to make Castro photography significantly more accessible and since that's one of the primary goals behind lonely speck, we think that's pretty cool I hope you enjoyed this quick review of the Google pixels Castro, photography mode. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. If you want to see future videos, if you have a piece of gear or a technique that you want to see us cover on the channel in a future video, let us know in the comments and check out all of our gear reviews, tutorials and inspiration on lonely speck com. You.

Source : Lonely Speck