DEC 24, 2023
NimishAndAkriti
Phone cameras these days do pretty much everything fine as long as you stick to "normal" snaps - portraits, dog and cat snaps, party pics and so on. But train your phone's camera on the moon and something goes wrong...or rather, the moon goes all blobby! Phone brands have been trying to overcome this (Samsung and Huawei very controversially, Apple through more conventional means) but we think one band has finally cracked it - Google with the Pixel 8 Pro.
edited
2
❤️
Now, phone cameras HAVE taken decent snaps of the moon in the past, Huawei did so with its Leica-inspired P series in 2017, and Samsung did a very good job with its Galaxy S23 Ultra. Most Android flagships today have some sort of "moon mode" for better moon snaps. But these are often controversial (some brands arre accused of using preloaded images of the moon!). This is the Pixel 8 Pro scores - it simply snaps the moon. And it does so surprisingly well.
The Pixel 8 Pro comes with a 50 megapixel main camera, a 48 megapixel telephoto sensor and a 48 megapixel ultrawide sensor on the back. The telephoto sensor can give up to 5X optical zoom but can give decent snaps even upto 30x zoom, although we would advise stopping at around 15x. It is this telephoto sensor that does the moon shooting Allied with (we suspect) Google's legendary computational photography, it delivers astonishing results. Like this!
What makes the Pixel 8 pro's performance really brilliant in this regard is that you need to do nothing special to get a moon shot. Having a relatively dark surrounding helps, but that apart, you have to choose no special mode (you can choose to use night mode, but it is not necessary). All you need to do is point the Pixel at the moon and keep zooming. Remember to keep your hands steady (it gets tough past 20x), and you will be rewarded with superb snaps.
A remarkable feature of the Pixel 8 Pro's moonshot performance is that it can capture other elements of the sky too. So if the moon rises relatively early, you can get a shot of it between the leaves of a tree! Once again, no special mode needed. The shots will have some noise and a touch of blur here and there but we think these are the best we have taken overall in terms of quality and ease of use on ANY phone camera. Especially after the latest update!
We are not going to say that the Pixel 8 Pro takes better pictures of the moon than a proper DSLR or even a superzoom compact. But it brings the phone camera's ease of use and acceptable quality to a very difficult subject. Will other brands follow suit? We hope they do, and think beyond weird moon modes. Snapping the moon should be democratised!
(Note: Update your Pixel 8 Pro to the latest software before you go moon shooting. It makes a difference!)