With its newly improved Super Resolution Zoom, the Pixel 4 makes a case for itself as a replacement for a compact camera with a 4-6x zoom range. The kind you might bring on vacation - something with a sensor that`s a little bigger and a modest zoom that won`t be too cumbersome while you explore your destination.
I took the Pixel 4 as my primary camera on a recent trip, but just to satisfy my curiosity, packed the Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II alongside it. The Pixel 4 fell short in a couple of ways, but overall it did the job well enough that I wouldn`t have regretted taking it as my only camera. Here`s what it did well, what the dedicated camera still does best, and why I think those differences don`t matter much to most people who take pictures.
A military fort-turned-prison is kind of a weird place to take someone for their birthday, but my fiancé is into that kind of thing. Plus, it was a great excuse to quote Sean Connery saying `Welcome to the Rock,` for several weeks leading up to the trip. I`d been to Alcatraz before, so I was happy to spend a little more effort and concentration on taking photos.
As you might imagine, a jailhouse provides lots of low light photography opportunities - a task that the Pixel 4 is well equipped for. Night Sight does a little bit of computational magic to create surprisingly detailed images in low light (and good light for that matter). But even the default camera mode does a very nice job in dim conditions, thanks to its ability to capture multiple frames, analyze them and assemble the best bits into one final image on the fly. In fact, it out-performed the Canon G5 X II in the situations where I tested both.
The moderately low light images below show the Pixel 4 producing a slightly more detailed, less noise-smudged image in its standard camera mode versus the Canon G5 X II`s out-of-camera JPEG.
Pixel 4 - 100% crop
Canon G5 X Mark II - 100% crop
Zoom is another st ...
|
