Your phone’s camera is even better than you thought

For many people, the camera is the most important feature of any new phone. Fortunately, there are plenty of great choices when it comes to phones with great cameras, and while some are slightly better than others, almost all new Android phones can take great photos.

We hear this all the time: manufacturers tell us about camera advancements and features, and then a review details them. This makes sense because technology advances. But last week it hit me right in the face and I was honestly surprised.

In a very niche situation and in a very strange way, my laziness showed me how awesome my Pixel 7 Pro’s camera is.

I like aquariums; they protect me from trouble. Above all. Anyway, I was trying to sell some small pieces of coral online, and someone sent me a quick message about a particular piece. They asked me for a photo to see what they were planning to buy.

Taking photos of corals is really difficult, even for a “professional” camera, because of the lights used to grow them. Corals need light of a certain wavelength and can grow like a plant, converting that light into energy. Our eyes don’t see a lot of the light that corals need, but it can certainly confuse a camera.

This sci-fi-looking photo is from a Galaxy Z Flip 5, and it’s not helpful because it looks nothing like what your eyes would see. Most of the time, if you point your phone at an aquarium while actinic lights are on, you get something similar. We can’t see it, but a camera’s sensor is overwhelmed by the enormous amount of UV light entering the lens.

You compensate for it with UV lens filters, like this kit made for smartphones. The science behind this is that the filters remove light measuring 15,000 and 20,000 Kelvin (think super blue light that blots out everything else) while leaving the rest of the light data alone. The result is a photo that closely resembles what our eyes see without interference from all UV.

Being too lazy to go get my little phone filter kit, I simply pointed the Pixel 7 Pro at the aquarium and took a photo. To my surprise, I got this thanks to Google’s automatic settings.

It’s still a strange photo, but it looks a lot like what my eyes see. And this would not have been possible just a few years ago. Even cooler, it can also do the same thing with video.

I can take a lot of photos of my aquarium with the Pixel 7 Pro, but not all of them are useful. I can also get a useful photo from other phones every now and then. I’ve played with it enough to confidently say that if you take a photo without “white” light, Google has found a way to make it work using computational photography.

While improved lenses play a role, the real magic is in using software to “create” an image. Smartphones leverage powerful processors and sophisticated software to improve image quality beyond what the sensor can capture alone. Techniques like High Dynamic Range (HDR) combine multiple exposures for balanced lighting, while noise reduction algorithms eliminate grain in low-light photos.

The result, in my case, is not a great photo: it’s grainy, there’s a lot of noise, and you’ll see strange artifacts where I have to clean the glass. But it’s a good representation of what you’re seeing, it takes away the glow from the background and it’s pretty consistent.

I have no idea what software magic is used to transform light that our eyes can’t see into an accurate representation of what is real because, in this case, “real” changes so much. Adding white lighting makes it easier to take a photo but slightly changes the colors you see, because nothing glows like a black light poster.

What I do know is that my year old phone takes photos of a difficult subject as well or better than my expensive “real” camera that doesn’t use voodoo logic and AI to the place of a good fast objective. I wish I had a Pixel 8 here to test because I know it did much better than expected taking photos in a public aquarium.

Phone cameras have moved beyond the “good enough” metric and are now a true professional tool. This is something I never would have thought possible just a few years ago, but I’m ready to put my bigger, heavier camera on the shelf.