In almost every situation – low light, bright daylight, complete darkness – the Pixel 7 Pro does an impressive job. The images clicked with the main camera of the Pixel 7 Pro offer a lot of detail and accurate colors. The Pixel 7 Pro focuses in a snap and Google’s computational photography game remains Je ne sais quois. The Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra is an excellent camera smartphone but has a habit of over-processing the images – something I’m not a fan of. However, there’s a fair amount of people who might end up preferring what Samsung does with Photos over Google. Google adopts a more natural tone on photos clicked from all three cameras – much like Apple does with the iPhone cameras.
You can have a lot of fun with the Pixel 7 Pro cameras. The Magic Eraser is a joy to use and removes objects much better than people. The Photo UnBlur is a new party trick from Google and it works like a treat. You can find any old photo and if it’s blurry you can use the unblur tool to make it look much better.
The telephoto lens also comes with massive improvements. You can easily switch between 2x and 5x zoom. Google Pixel 7 Pro zooms in to 30x zoom and results are mixed. At 5x zoom, the Pixel 7 Pro does a really good job. In fact, surprisingly, it manages to retain quite a few details. Go all the way up to 15x zoom and detail is preserved, but at 30x zoom it loses ground. Still, it’s an area where the Pixel 7 Pro easily outperforms the iPhone 14 Pro.
The Pixel 7 Pro also offers the ability to click macro shots. The macro photos come out really decent with plenty of detail, but it’s not on the same level as the iPhone 14 Pro.
The 10-megapixel selfie camera does a good job but is nothing exceptional. In this area, both the Galaxy S22 Ultra and the iPhone 14 Pro stay ahead of the Google Pixel 7 Pro. And the same goes for video capabilities. Google added Cinematic mode to the Pixel 7 Pro and did a good job implementing it. It’s a good first attempt at integrating the feature, but the iPhone handles Theater Mode better than the Pixel 7 Pro. In fact, both the Galaxy S22 Ultra and the iPhone 14 Pro have better capabilities than the Pixel 7 Pro as a total video camera package. For example, if you turn on 10-bit HDR mode while recording video, the footage will be pretty overexposed.
But there’s one thing that lets the Google Pixel 7 Pro’s camera down compared to the iPhone 14 Pros. Somehow the Tensor G2 chip takes quite a long time to perform certain tasks on certain features. Let’s take the Pixel 7 Pro’s night mode. The images that are clicked on in night vision mode are really good – there is a lot of detail and clarity, but it takes time to actually click on the image. The same goes for Magic Eraser, the processing time is a bit longer than I expected.
That said, the Google Pixel 7 Pro is excellent as a camera setup, as most of the images we clicked on turned out to be pretty brilliant. As a point-and-shoot camera, the Pixel 7 Pro is not only a jack of all trades, but ultimately also the master of all alleys.
