The Google Pixel 9 is about to go on sale, and I’ve been using one for the past five days to see how the camera performs with all the AI enhancements Google showcased on stage.
At the baseline, the Pixel 9 is a great mobile camera with a 50-megapixel sensor that’s been colour-tuned really nicely. It also has Google’s TrueTone feature, which has been improved this year to better recreate all skin tones, and in practice, it seems better than ever. The large mobile sensor also takes images with a nice depth of field, negating the need for portrait mode in a lot of instances.
The files themselves are rich and full of detail, allowing you to crop in significantly without losing detail, even using the ultra-wide lens, which has been bumped up to 48 megapixels this year. I took a macro shot of a bee with it that you can crop in 150 percent and still get a really crisp image. Other shots are the same, and Google’s reworked camera processing this year feels more in line with its sensor size; plus, I’ve always liked how Google allows you to take a JPEG and a RAW file with each shot if you enable it.
In terms of AI features, there isn’t much that’s blown me beyond the new ‘Add me’ feature. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty cool and makes it easy for groups of people to take photos together, so I’d say it does work as advertised. Some of the older Pixel camera AI features are still here too, like ‘Action Pan’ and ‘Long Exposure.’ The AI enhancements to the zoom aren’t bad and like other Pixels, you can hold up your palm to get the camera to take your photo hands-free.
The perfect camera for the group photographer?
There are a few things that make the Pixel 9 a great social camera, but none are as exciting as the new Add Me feature. The premise is simple and the on-screen guides make it really easy for anyone to pick up and understand in a few seconds. My first attempt at using the feature worked quite well, and it almost perfectly put my girlfriend and me together on a bench. It wasn’t able to fully recreate her shadow casting across me, but at face value, it’s a pretty believable that we were both on that bench. That said, we didn’t coordinate poses so we do look a little awkward. Something I didn’t expect is sometimes you still need to trial and error your poses to make sure they look natural.
My next test was with my friend at his house, and I jumped on his bed to showcase the feature to him. To me, this one looks a lot less believable, and when you look at the before and after, it’s clear that AI put in a lot more work to blend these. I also saw some examples from others testing out the Pixel 9 series, and really, the phone only nails it in ideal circumstances with a clear background. The more complex it gets, the higher the chance the AI might fail to blend something together.
In addition, there is a slight learning curve when using this capture method. While the AI can blend things, it’s best if everyone involved understands what’s going on and does their best to look natural. The AI is good, but sadly it can’t make us less awkward. Beyond that, the closer you can get to matching the two frames, the better, since it means the phone won’t have to manipulate the photo as much to blend them.
At the end of the day, I think this is one of the most compelling camera features Google has released in years, and I can see people who take lots of group photos, or even parents with kids who want to take group shots on vacations using this a lot.
AI zoom is smooth, but works
The AI feature that I think people will use the most is Google’s ‘Super Res Zoom’ system. When you pull the camera in to zoom, machine learning fills in the detail, helping keep the image feeling crisp, at least in theory. On the Pixel 9 Pro, this can extend the zoom range to 20x, but on the Pixel 9, it only takes it to 8x.
In practice, it works, but the results vary depending on the subject. If you want to take a photo of a building, this is going to work out pretty well since it’s mostly sharp angles. If you want to take a photo of a landscape with something moving like people or tree leaves, it’s got a high chance of being mushy. That said, I don’t want to knock this feature too hard since it does work really well on still life.
Other AI features
One feature I haven’t been able to test yet is the new Night Sight-powered panoramas. Living downtown, it’s hard to find somewhere that both warrants a panorama and gets dark enough to test Night Sight. That said, if you find yourself in this situation, the Pixel 9 should help you take a much more pleasing shot than its predecessors.
There’s not much else new in the camera, but the AI-powered long exposure dupes are back, so you can take photos of moving subjects to get motion blur applied to them. The ‘Motion mode’ is my favourite since it allows you to get cool shots of moving subjects like buses and cars. The other mode is called ‘Long Exposure’ and it lets you snap a photo over the course of about three seconds and AI will help it make it look like the photo was taken over a longer period of time and it will blur anything that moved.
Both of these long exposure modes are pretty cool, but I find them a lot more gimmicky than some of the other features in the Google Camera, and I wish Google had an overflowing drawer so I could move these off the main camera carousel to help clean up that interface a little bit.
It’s a good camera, what can I say
As a photographer myself, my favourite thing about using Android phones, and especially Google Pixels, is how easy it is to get RAWs and JPEGs at the same time. I know you can do it on iOS, but you need a third-party app to truly do it, and even then, you can’t disable the HDR viewfinder, making the whole thing rather tricky. In the Pixel Camera app, you enable RAW capture in the setting, and by default, you’ll snap RAWs and JPEGs at the same time. I didn’t play much with the Pixel 8 series, but capturing RAWs always took a moment on the Pixel 6 and 7 Pro I’m used to, and on the 9, the camera processes images much faster than ever before. Having these RAW images means you can edit them to get the most out of the camera, but even if you don’t, the default Pixel processing is really good too.
Over my five days with the phone I’ve really enjoyed the camera, but some of the arbitrary limitations Google has placed on the device tempt me towards the 9 Pro instead. For instance, only the 9 Pro phones, and last year’s 8 Pro get access to the Zoom Enhance feature that uses AI to clean sharpen your image when you crop in. That said, the default photos look nice, the camera is much snappier than years prior and you still have access to a lot of fun tools like Add me, Astrophotography mode and more.
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