Telephoto Camera: Pixel 10 Pro vs 11 Pro

I'm not sophisticated enough to have noticed improvements in the main phone camera in the past 5-10 years, but distance shots are still not very good. The next generation Pixel Pro was supposed to have an improved "telephoto" camera, and when Google Fi offered me a sufficiently good deal [1] I decided to upgrade.

Going from the 10 Pro to the 11 Pro the telephoto camera goes from a 1/2.51" sensor to 1/1.95", and since this is a diagonal measurement this means bringing in ~65% more light. But does it actually take better pictures?

I wandered around taking pairs of pictures, all at 10x. Of this, 5x is optical zoom and the remaining 2x is cropping: I'm showing the pictures as Google Photos gives them to me. All hand-held: while a tripod would likely improve high-zoom pictures, I'm interested in real-world performance which is all going to be hand-held. Every set is the 10 followed by the 11 (taken back-to-back), cropped to 1100x1100.

I started with some well lit things; here's our garden, ~35ft away:

Some construction near our house, ~45ft away:

A neighbor's roof, ~90ft away:

Now some things that are less well-lit. These are in our bedroom with the window open for natural light but only indirect.

A picture Sarah Hirsch painted, ~10ft away:

Our curtains:

Moving to a room with even less light, a poster on the spare room wall, also ~10ft away:

There's some kind of algorithmic cleanup going on, which is especially visible in the words. Is the extra detail in the pictures from the new phone due to it doing a better job of capturing the scene, or is it just making details that look nice? Let's give it an eye exam!

I made a little sheet of random handwritten letters. I could have printed a chart but I hate printers and printers hate me I expect AI-based image processing would overperform on printed text, especially in standard fonts, due to being heavily trained on it. I attached the sheet to the wall:

Just like my own eyes, as the phone gets farther from the sheet it will have more trouble distinguishing the letters, and this will let us see the extent to which it looks better via real details vs made up ones. To get a sense of how hard this is, the top to the bottom of the top "g" is 7/8". Testing with eyes, at 22ft you can just barely make out some of the top-line letters but Lily and I both had mistakes, while at 11ft we could reliably read the top line letters but Lily had several mistakes on the next line.

For this comparison I added Julia's phone, a Pixel 10a, because she didn't object. It would have been better to go back re-do the first part of this post, but I'm too lazy; please pass along a plausible excuse to the peer reviewers. Here's 7ft:

The 10a is already struggling, which makes sense because it doesn't have any optical zoom: it's just cropping to zoom in. Looking at the letters in the bottom row, I think it's running the same image processing and just has less to work with? The letters are already getting a little unnatural in how they're depicted.

The same three at 11ft:

The 10a shows the "t" at the beginning of the second line as a "c", and the third and fourth lines are illegible. The 10 Pro has the third letter of the final line, "a", as "o". The 11 Pro looks noticably better than the 10 Pro, and doesn't seem to have made anything up.

At 22ft:

This is not what the 10a is good at, and we're no longer getting anything useful from it. For the other two this is a real test, just at their level of ability. The top two lines are right for both, but the 11 Pro is clearer. On the 10 Pro, the third line is semi-legible scribbles, and there are some misleading ones: in the third row the last four letters come out as an AI-hallucinated "i g n 5" instead of "s g a s". On the 11 Pro the third line is correct, and it's only the fourth line where it starts swapping letters. Even then, it gets 11/15 correct [2].

It looks to me like the automated cleanup is a common factor across the three Pixels, and the 11 Pro is giving the algorithms more to work with. But I also wouldn't trust any of these phones in cases where correctly capturing details at the limit of the camera's resolution was important.

Overall, this seems like a nice improvement, and worth the hassle of needing to sell my old phone!

[1] Google Fi was offering enough of a discount on a Pixel 11 Pro to bring the cost down below what I think I can sell my 10 Pro for. Specifically, they listed it at $1,100 with a $650 discount, bringing it down to $450 ($477 including tax), and I think my 10 Pro will sell for ~$500. The 11 Pro does have less memory than the 10 Pro (12 GB vs 16 GB, due to the AI-induced shortage) but it still seemed likely worth upgrading for the improved camera and other smaller benefits of running a newer phone. The memory decrease isn't ideal, but looking at how I use my phone I'm not expecting to notice.

[2] I read "t p o t f h p b f a g - r q p" instead of "t y a t f h p b f c g m r q p" which is four mistakes out of fifteen letters.