I recently replaced my phone and decided to treat myself to the Google Pixel 6. Today, I decided to put the camera a bit to the test and see how the camera holds up. I’ve never had a phone camera that wasn’t super limited in terms of noise and despite the hype, I did not actually expect amazing results. However, I was wrong. This camera is simply fantastic. And I don’t mean the Google AI. Which is not bad but IMHO a little too opinionated and biased towards just a lot of blown out saturation and overly bright pictures. What I mean is that the raw photos you can shoot with this camera are of a surprisingly high quality for a phone camera.
Here’s a raw shot that I took using an Android app called Open Camera, which allows you to shoot raw and which I cannot recommend enough. I use syncthing to synchronize my phone with my two computers (a mac, and a linux laptop). So, jumping into Darktable is easy after I shoot some photos.
The camera itself is a 50 mega pixel camera. However, even in raw format, you only get 12.5. Basically it combines 4 pixels to create a single raw pixel. So, it’s less than half the resolution of my Fuji X-T30 which I have been shooting with for the last two years. 12.5 megapixels still adds up to a respectable 4064x3056 pixels. Which is of course plenty for most things you might want to do with a photo. I’d rather have good pixels than lots of pixels. Sadly, Open Camera does not give you any choice of which of the lenses to use. This phone actually has four separate cameras (1 front, and 3 on the back with different focal lengths & sensors).
IMG_20220507_221258.dng (23.9 MB)
Darktable edits:
IMG_20220507_221258.dng.xmp (7.9 KB)
These files are licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
The scene is my street (Bergstrasse) in Berlin Mitte at night. It’s an alright moody shot with some street lights and light from windows. Nothing spectacular and not really my best in terms of composition. I was simply trying to get a few shots to play with.
A few simple Darktable edits turned this into a pretty usable photo. The dng loads with rather washed out colors (my old Nokia had the same issue when shooting raw). But that’s easily fixed by simply boosting mid tone saturation by 50% in filmic. I also boosted the exposure quite a bit. It was way underexposed.
I was particularly impressed with the low noise levels. There is some of course but not a lot and especially not a lot of color noise. Those four combined pixels really cut down on that. I simply turned on profiled denoise and that got rid of what little noise there was. But even without that, the photo looks fine. The rest is just some default tweaks (contrast equalizer) that I have configured. I’ll need a default preset for the saturation thing, for sure. And a default exposure boost of 1 stop or so seems also desirable.
I’ve never owned a camara that can shoot a photo like this without a lot of noise. My Fuji is great and it would have produced a pretty photo for sure. But you’d be shooting at iso 3200 or even higher. At those iso levels, noise is a given. It’s not horrible of course but you lose a lot of detail with denoise. Open Camera shot this at 711, which is a weird iso value. But it seems to work. I need to watch the shutter speeds a bit but at 1/25 seconds, this seems pretty sharp. I’m guessing there’s some sort of stabilization happening.
The night site mode on this camera is amazing of course. And I actually shot a few with that mode to be able to compare with the Google AI. Those shots certainly do not disappoint. But now that I know how good the camera is by itself, that is actually much less impressive. I could probably get quite close with some more Darktable magic. And I actually like my night shots to be dark. I’m not really into HDR either and I find that look to be not very pleasing. The Pixel 6 does some hdr and it’s alright but not really my thing. I might use it in a pinch but ultimately, I like having more creative control.
This camera is simply excellent when you shoot raw. As this photo shows, it works very well under low light conditions. Which means it is going to be great under pretty much any light conditions. I love using my Fuji but this is a pretty nice backup camera to have in my pocket.
