The Pixel 6's Camera System: A Mixed Bag of Consistency and Promise

Sometimes, the iPhone camera system gives me a 10 out of 10, but also a 7 out of 10 some other times. Or it's just a camera that consistently delivers an 8 or 9 out of 10 every single time because that's the nature of the iPhone that I've come to expect. The Pixel 6 Pro's camera system is more consistent in its execution, but sometimes struggles with over-processing, resulting in shots that feel unnatural and HDR-like.

On the other hand, the Pixel 6's camera has moments of brilliance, capturing stunning images that are on par with some of the best smartphones out there. However, it also has a tendency to produce weird, over HDR-lookin' shots that I wouldn't want to share with anyone. These instances of inconsistent performance leave me wondering if the Pixel 6 is truly a top-tier camera system.

One area where the Pixel 6 shines is in its video capabilities. The video from this phone really levels up, offering great dynamic range, stabilization, and background blur. The big sensor on the back of the phone allows for impressively staying-in-focus shots, even in challenging scenes. Of course, there are some instances of noisy shadows during processing, but overall, the color, exposure, and white balance are all top-notch.

Another interesting feature I noticed is that the Pixel 6 cranks up the ISO in the viewfinder, making it easy to see noise before taking a photo. This can be a bit jarring at first, especially when trying to take selfies with friends. However, as I soon discovered, this increased sensitivity allows for faster frame rates and shutter speeds, resulting in sharper photos even in low-light conditions.

One feature that impressed me was the automatic face blending during portrait mode. When someone moves quickly, the primary camera may produce a blurry face, but the Pixel 6's ultrawide camera can merge in the faster, sharper face from the ultra-wide lens into the shot, saving the day. This kind of seamless performance is exactly what I want from my smartphone camera.

As someone who has used both the iPhone and Pixel series for a couple of weeks, I can confidently say that the Pixel 6's camera system is better than the iPhone's in some ways. The consistency and accuracy are unparalleled, but the iPhone still edges out the Pixel 6 in terms of sheer image quality.

When it comes to pricing, the Pixel 6 starts at $599 for the standard model, while the Pixel 6 Pro begins at $799. This is a significant price difference, with the Pro variant costing nearly twice as much as the base model. In retrospect, I think this $300 delta makes the extra cash well worth it, given the added features and upgrades like the telephoto lens, wider selfie camera, and bigger screen.

Ultimately, my conclusion is that the Pixel 6 is an incredibly good phone that offers an amazing value for its price. While it may not be the absolute best smartphone on the market, its consistent performance, intuitive software features, and stunning image quality make it a top contender in the flagship category.

As I look back at my experience with the Pixel 6, I'm reminded of just how significant this phone's release is for Google. For years, enthusiast phones have been the driving force behind innovation in the smartphone world. However, with the Pixel 6, Google has finally turned its attention to delivering a solid, user-friendly device that competes on a hardware level.

This pivot represents a new era for Google, one where they're competing directly with other top-tier manufacturers rather than just innovating behind the scenes. As someone who's deeply invested in this ecosystem, I'm thrilled to see this shift and can't wait to see what the future holds for Pixel smartphones.

For now, that's all I have to say about the Pixel 6 and its camera system. Stay tuned for more tech-related content as we delve into other exciting topics during Techtober!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso hey what's up mkbhd here and i've been using pixel 6 and pixel 6 pro for about three weeks now this is it this is the first year we're expecting a real google flagship right so previous pixels have been pretty nice and they've had great cameras and pretty cool software features but overall pretty lackluster hardware but this is a step up we're expecting big things a big new camera array a new design language they made their own chip there's a lot going for it so this is their moon shot right this is their chance to compete with the big dogs so now that i've used them i will say these are my favorite pixels ever and they are the most google phones ever made for sure but reality check they're not perfect and there's definitely some areas where they come up a little bit short so i'm going to go over those things but off the top i just want to hit you with the prices first okay so 5.99 for pixel 6 starting and 8.99 for the pixel 6 pro those are both at 128 gigs that's really competitive so there's a lot of action already at that like 599 dollar price range but also the one they keep calling a flagship which is the six pro this is the one that's here to take shots at the iphones and samsung galaxy s21 ultras of the world and it competes but the six is the real deal so i've grown to really like this camera bar design for the pixels and the fact is it is polarizing like it doesn't look quite like any other phone theoretically you know the huge new camera sensors need all this thickness here but it could have looked like any other phone like the vivo x70 pro plus has the same 50 megapixel sensor but they went with a camera rectangle but this visor it's a look this is the uh the pixel phone look now it's very easily recognizable and i think that's on purpose and they can keep it this way for at least a few years and the bar design is functional i will say my index finger does end up resting nicely underneath the camera bar when i'm holding it which is nice it doesn't rock on a table either if you're typing or using it out of your hand the only weird part is it doesn't quite like blend nicely into the aluminum sides of this phone like i think it would have been really cool if it was like a seamless blend like one piece like what samsung did with the s21 ultra but there are a lot of seams all over this camera module but hey at the end of the day if you're just going to toss the case on it like this grip case from channel sponsor dbrand it's basically just going to cancel the bump anyway but now you've got you know a flat even phone you've got your icons logos but it's still obviously a pixel underneath that you still have the visor across the back so i think it's a win unless you think it's incredibly ugly in which case try not to look at the back of the phone too much but come on visors look cool but the part you look at on the front of the phone is huge on both screens both of these phones are huge and i think the the question naturally is why didn't they make a smaller one and i think google's answer would be well there are people who want to spend less on a phone but most of those people still want a big screen so they gave it to him so pixel 6's screen is a pretty massive 6.4 inches from corner to corner 90 hertz 1080p and flat and with pretty small bezels overall and a hole punch in the top middle for the selfie camera it's a pretty good screen again for a 600 phone but how about that flagship though so with the 6 pro we're looking at 6.7 inches 1440p and up to 120 hertz it is super super sharp very responsive and has been an absolute pleasure but since they're saying it's the flagship i can get a little more nitpicky here these curved edges they're kind of going out of style i know that gets you even smaller bezels and they are a little bit smaller but the fact that it gets kind of a bit darker in the very corners isn't doing the screen any favors and there also is a little bit of color shift off axis that you really straight up just don't see on the more expensive screens like on the s21 ultra or the iphone 13 pro also the fingerprint reader on the display of both of these phones is kind of slow so it appears to be an optical sensor shining a light on your finger instead of those new ultrasonic ones samsung is using and yeah it's gotten kind of annoying after a while often it will take a full like half second at least long enough for me to get annoyed that i'm waiting for it to read my finger i think they could have used a better sensor here or at least done this a little faster i am comparing it to thousand dollar phones though so again this is what i was talking about earlier it's impressive that it's hanging with the big dogs but it is just undercutting it a little bit now the top hole punch in the middle of these displays houses the selfie camera it's a pretty decent 8 megapixel wide camera on the pixel 6 but it's closer to an ultra wide selfie on the 6 pro which i really like a lot and it's also bumped up to 11 megapixels so it can also shoot 4k selfie video fits more people on the frame big fan of the six pros selfie camera and then also you know the little things that you'd sort of expect a great phone to do well but that you don't want to have to think about too much like clicky buttons check both phones are fully water resistant and the haptics are really good on both phones as well so that's a pixel thing but the biggest new piece google's adding to these phones is definitely on the inside and that would be the new tensor chip so designed by google for this phone this is going to let them do in theory things that they couldn't do with the off-the-shelf qualcomm chip they'd used before you know machine learning better ai better computational photography all kinds of things they want to focus on with just this phone they can do it and it's done that it's really impressive now a lot of people are wondering how tensor would benchmark just and i don't think that's the right way to think about this new chip but just out of curiosity i threw a geekbench at it and we have the numbers it got 1035 on single core 2800 multi-core so that's maybe 8 to 10 slower with the cpu on paper than the snapdragon triple eight but also still way way ahead of the snapdragon 765 g they used on the pixel five last year but then also i did uh some gpu benchmarks from 3dmark and it was looking at 10 to 12 faster than the snapdragon triple a but that's clearly not what tensor is about this this might be the biggest this is what makes it a googly phone this is the biggest difference between the benchmarks and what the phone is actually capable of that i've ever seen so first of all these phones have been really quick and responsive no performance problems for me i've mostly been dailying the 6 pro which has got the adaptive refresh rate up to 120 hertz and i've been loving that but it's not about the performance as much as it's about the features and this continues a tradition of the pixel phone being the smartest smartphone to come out every year so you know besides the stuff we've already seen like call screening where google assistants can filter incoming calls for you or now playing which ambiently detects whatever song is playing in the background in your environment and just keeps a running list so you can remember what song was going on in the background in the grocery store an hour ago and we've seen live captioning of any and all videos and phone calls and movies in real time besides all of that there is some new improved stuff thanks to tensor and dedicated pieces of that ship so first of all speech to text unreal on this phone absolutely incredible to the point where it actually changes the way i use the phone i try to use voice more often on this phone because it's so good so anywhere i'd normally be typing i use that mic button anywhere i can and no matter how fast you talk you can basically rap at it you can talk 200 words per minute like eminem if you want to and it'll just keep going quick it also adds punctuation really accurately so you don't really even have to think about that you're just automatically grammatically accurate all the time this is going to make sitting in lectures and people in class taking notes way less stressed and basically anywhere else transcription is useful and even on top of all that it's smart so if you say a name it will pull from the names in your contacts try to make sure it spells it right if there's multiple different spellings of names for something and you correct it once it will remember that corrected spelling of a name things like that if you say delete this or send it doesn't type those words it knows what you're trying to do and will actually delete the words or send the message now there's also a new feature in google photos for pixel six that lets you go back to any picture in your library and erase the things that you don't want now this isn't blowing your mind if you've seen content aware phil on photoshop before but i'm mostly really impressed with how easy and simple it makes the process so you go into any image go to tools and it's called magic eraser and it automatically selects what it thinks you want to remove usually a background photo bomber of some sort and then you can just do it and if there's other stuff you want to remove you can draw a sloppy outline around it it will auto detect the edges usually really well with any sort of contrast finds the object you're talking about and just removes it just like that so it kind of reads like magic and people on twitter loved it but just like photoshop's content aware feel it has certain things it works really well on and other things not so much so it works best with simple repeating backgrounds you know maybe gradients or textures and with a lot of contrast but if you try to get rid of like a large object that's in front of several different backgrounds well that's just gonna look bad like that's difficult for ai but i was very impressed with some of the things that pulled off just messing around with it it's probably a gimmick feature still for most people but this is yet another demo of the powerful ai and tensor that can be pretty great sometimes now something i thought would be better with tensor is battery life and you know maybe i was getting my hopes up too high because what i saw apple do with their silicon has been amazing like their chips are basically the pinnacle of efficiency not to compare too much but when i see iphone 13 pro max getting eight plus hours of screen on time easy with a 4300 milliamp hour battery that's pretty amazing so now i see pixel 6 come out 40 600 milliamp hour battery in the pixel 6 and 5 000 milliamp hours in the 6 pro and they design their own chips so i was thinking this would be amazing it's not so i was consistently getting three and a half to four and a half hours of screen on time on the pixel 6 pro and slightly less on the six which is just average at best it's not that great like that's dead by the end of a long day pretty often now on a 600 phone that's not too crazy you can probably forgive that but on a flagship that's a weakness and then also on top of that you got to remember there is no charging brick in the box like we saw and it supports up to 30 watts of wired charging which is not super fast but it's it's okay and the wireless charging that's supported is even a little bit slower than that so the battery situation for me has been overall kind of a bummer on the flagship i can get around it by just charging all the time like in my car at my desk at work but you never really want to have to do that you kind of just want to be able to use your phone normally and not think about it but hey using this phone when it's not running low on battery has been awesome thanks to android 12. i want to use it all the time totally made over aesthetic material you and all kinds of visual overhaul happening here so i made an entire video about all the new features here which i'll link below that like button but yeah i really like most of it at first it definitely feels like a little spread out like there's a lot of extra blank and like white space in the ui there's these huge ui elements and really big buttons and especially on a huge phone with a huge screen it feels kind of cartoonish at first but it all comes together it's sort of this big flowing bouncy ui with matching colors and lots of nice scrolling physics and haptics it all ties together but yeah it's just nice that no matter what wallpaper i choose for example the quick settings and the settings app and all the menu backgrounds and widgets all find an accent color in the wallpaper and match it right away it's just it's so sweet it's nice it's nice my only little gripe with android 12 is two things actually one that the brightness slider is two swipes away it's all the way at the top and you got to drag it down i i just think that could be way more reachable and way more accessible and the other thing is i don't like the new internet toggle i usually just want to turn wi-fi on or off but now that takes an extra tap and i feel like they could just add a wi-fi toggle in the quick settings but just a general internet one exists but you know what when you think about pixel what do you think of you think of the software and the camera i think the software is pretty great so let's talk about the most distinctive part of this phone the camera so pixels have had the same camera more or less since the pixel 2 right this small 12 megapixel sensor on the pixel 2 was pretty revolutionary for its time and so they kept the same one in pixel 3. and then kept the same one in pixel four and then kept the same one in pixel five and it was fine because others were catching up around them with better hardware but google had figured out a really great way to compensate for the small sensor with incredible software amazing computational photography great hdr and multi-frame bracketing and all this stuff that made their images their night sight all of those photos look incredible it was almost like they just proved with these cameras that the software is more important than the hardware itself but now here we are in 2021 everyone's catching up and so now pixel 6 has launched with a brand new camera system featuring a much better hardware suite a huge 50 megapixel main sensor but you can't actually take 50 megapixel photos there's no high res mode or anything for it it's always binning and everything is down to 12 and a half megapixels and then there's a new 12 megapixel ultra wide and the pro phone also gets a 4x telephoto camera as well so okay been shooting with it i think google's still running all of their camera algorithms at 11 like when they don't need to anymore so this has much better hardware and they had been compensating like i said for a smaller weaker sensor to bring it up and bring out all the magic and now running that same type of look starts to make photos look a bit over processed a little over hdr-y pretty frequently so there are a bunch of interesting things about this camera but like i said 50 megapixels doing 4-1 binning with no option to keep all 50 means you're only really getting a small amount of improved sharpness over the previous but photos are sharp white balance is pretty good but still bias is a little bit too cool sometimes but you can see in regular lighting the pixel does an enormous amount of hdr and it almost looks like someone turned up the clarity slider in photoshop just a little bit too high so shadows never quite get all the way to black and it's very rare that highlights like the sky are ever blown out but then yeah that also gives you a bit of an exaggerated like over-processed look when the photo should just have regular lighting now the thing is this sensor is amazing so it's taking in a ton of light and a lot of information so actually the more difficult high dynamic range shooting situations are handled great like shooting directly into the sun or shooting at night with bright lights these more difficult shots are actually very impressive looking now because the processing is keeping so much information in the final shot but even so these darker scenes tend to overexpose when you don't adjust the slider in the viewfinder so it's really impressive believe me having all this sharpness and almost no noise in a nighttime shot that's technically incredible but it shouldn't look this bright so here's a comparison shot with the iphone 13 pro on full auto just to give you an idea of the difference between night modes it's almost turning night into day on the pixel but here's a pretty perfect example to visualize all this processing on the left is a raw shot from the pixels camera that we colored with just a quick boost to the vibrance and on the right side is a google process jpeg and that sensor you can see is getting a ton of information and detail and the processing is to make it look like what it thinks we want on a phone screen again bringing up the shadows bringing down the highlights sharpening everything but i think the ideal might be somewhere in between these now the ultrawide is pretty good it's not amazing but it has a lot of the same traits as last year and i'm glad they're still in ultra wide there's no macro mode with it though and then the telephoto on the pro was surprisingly good when you're moving around handheld although you still get much better sharpness out of like an s21 ultra google super resume is pretty good at sharpening up and improving shots that would normally be soft but they can still tend to look a little bit like a watercolor painting at the extremes but overall you know as someone who's loved the pixel's rich contrast look and really honestly preferred it for years over pretty much anything else i think this is an almost great camera that can take some tweaks and and maybe some software updates at least i'm hoping to get better because i i've taken some incredible sharp photos with this camera and i've also taken some weird looking ones so basically i guess the question is would you rather have a camera that's a 10 out of 10 sometimes but also a 7 out of 10 some other times or just a camera that just gives you 9 out of 10 9 9 nine every single time because that's the iphone that nine out of ten that consistent shot the iphone 13 pro's camera system is more consistent but the pixels camera aces some shots sometimes but then also gives me a really weird over hdr looking shot that i wouldn't even want to share so bounces back and forth i will say the video from the pixel did really level up kind of the same style as the photos it has great dynamic range great stabilization and that big sensor is giving you real background blur and impressively staying in focus most of the time and in some of these harder scenes you can definitely see the processing working like here when it's trying to bring up the shadows it's pretty noisy but still overall color and exposure and white balance and the details are all great with the pixel 6's video and i'm really happy to see that and then another thing i noticed the pixel really cranks iso all the way up in the viewfinder so you can see a lot of noise before you snap a photo and start the processing like it's very easy to see this here in a screen recording but that's what it's doing you can see in a selfie viewfinder especially it'll look super jacked up and really noisy just to keep a high frame rate and shutter speed when you're taking the selfie and then you take it and you see it process and then everything sharpens up and it looks miles better and while that seemed kind of weird to me at first i actually think this is a good move so tensor has a horsepower to just run the stuff at high iso and the preview might not look great but at least it's not choppy and laggy and then it basically under promises and over delivers people will see the viewfinder and think this will be a bad photo and then they'll be shocked at how good the final photo is when you're taking photos with faces in them the ultrawide camera is always running at a higher shutter speed so if you get someone moving too quick and the primary camera has a blurry face it can merge in the faster sharper face from the ultrawide camera into your shot automatically i mean that's you kind of just never have blurry faces in your photos overall just as someone who's used now both of these phones for a couple weeks iphone's camera system is better than the pixels it just is right now it doesn't it's more consistent it doesn't struggle with over processing it shoots to more formats it's a better overall camera system but this the hardware is so good in the pixels and you can see that promise in those 10 out of 10 shots that the pixel fan in me is like hoping maybe in one or two software updates it'll be a 10 out of 10 more often but until then because we don't know if that's ever gonna happen yeah you saw the sample shots that's that's what it does that's how it looks so yeah i want to come back to the price at the end here like i said 5.99 for pixel 6 8.99 for pixel 6 pro it's a 300 delta and for that difference you're getting 120 hertz over 90 1440p over 1080 a curved screen over a flat one some glossy sides over the matte sides i like the matte sides better then you get an extra telephoto camera on the back and you get a wider selfie camera on the front a little more ram a little bit bigger screen that's kind of it so basically my conclusion is pixel 6 really good phone really really great deal because for 600 bucks this is one of the best ones you can get and then the difference in money to get to six pro it makes it a better phone than the pixel six sure a lot of good stuff here but this stuff doesn't vault it over the top of all the other flagships it just you know i would get this phone if you've really got to have the telephoto or the ultra wide selfie camera or the bigger faster screen that's kind of the main bullets but i think pixel 6 is almost incredible and the truth is this is the most important google phone yet this this pivot to you know from enthusiast phones and really cool cameras and software features to still being the smartest smartphone in the world but also now having much better hardware this new design and making their own chip and competing like really competing i'm into it i'm super into it so that's fun to see that's pixel six and six pro it's techtober so there's still a lot more to talk about so stay tuned for that stuff subscribe if you haven't already thanks for watching catch you guys the next one peace\n"