![]() But it appears that, at best, the Pixel 3 utilized 15 frames of 1/5s shutter speeds, or 3s total, while the iPhone 11 indicated it would use a total of 1s in the user interface (the EXIF indicates 1/8s, so is likely un-representative). It's hard to tell what shutter speeds and total exposure time either camera used, due to stacking techniques using differing shutter speeds and discarding frames or tiles at will based on their quality or usability. There's more detail and far less noise – particularly in the skies – in the Google Pixel 3 shot. Below we have a comparison of the iPhone with Night Mode manually turned on next to the Google Pixel 3 Night Sight (also manually enabled). You'll see the Night Mode option as a moon-like icon appearing on the bottom left of the screen in landscape orientation. ![]() Late evening light (25 lux) | Winner: Google Pixel 3Īs the sun sets, light levels drop, and at 25 lux we finally have the option to turn on Night Mode on the iPhone. Or the buildings and their windows up top, which appear far crisper on the Pixel 3. ![]() Take a look at the detail in the foreground trees and foliage, particularly right behind the fence at the bottom. And thanks to its averaging of up to 15 frames and its super-resolution pipeline, it provides far more detail than the iPhone 11. Yet Night Sight on the Google Pixel 3 is available, as it is in all situations. At this light level (485 lux, as measured by the iPhone 11 camera), the option for Night Mode on iPhone 11 is not available. Evening light (485 lux) | Winner: Google Pixel 3īefore sunset, there's still a good amount of available light. In the headings, we've labeled the winner. You can click on the image in any rollover to open the full-size image in a separate tab. To better appreciate differences between the cameras, simply pinch and zoom your smartphone display to magnify the images, or increase the magnification of your browser window. And before we proceed to our comparisons, please see this footnote about the rollovers and crops that follow: on 'HiDPI' screens like smartphones and higher-end laptops/displays, the following crops are 100%, but on 'standard' displays you'll only see 50% crops. Note that Night Mode is only available with the main camera unit, not the 2x or 0.5x cameras (if you see Night Mode triggering in 2x mode, it's dark enough that the iPhone is actually using its main wide camera and cropping in). The iPhone 11 images spanning this time period are shown below. All shots are handheld, since this is how we expect users to operate their smartphones. The images span an hour-long timeframe, from approximately 500 lux to 5 lux. Hence we've chosen to look at how the iPhone 11 performs as light levels decrease from evening light before sunset to very low light conditions well after sunset. Different devices take different approaches, which ultimately means that comparative performance across devices can vary significantly with light level. 'Low light performance' is difficult to sum up in one number or picture when it comes to computational imaging. ![]() Let's see how it stacks up compared to Google's Night Sight and Apple's own previous generation iPhone XS. It uses 'adaptive bracketing' to combine both long and short exposures (to freeze any movement) to build a high quality image in low light conditions. With the iPhone 11, Apple launched its own Night Mode to compete with offerings from Android phones. And Google's Night Sight has been the low-light king of recent 1 releases, thanks to its averaging of many (up to 15) frames, its clever tile-based alignment to deal with hand movement and motion in the scene, and its use of a super-resolution pipeline that yields far better resolution, particularly color resolution, and lower noise than simple frame stacking techniques. Low light performance is a huge differentiator that separates the best smartphones from the worst. Low light performance is a huge differentiator that separates the best smartphones from That's where computational techniques and burst photography come in. But smartphone image quality can take a nosedive as light levels drop and there just aren't many photons to collect. That's no surprise – when there's a lot of light, it doesn't matter so much that the small smartphone sensor doesn't collect as many photons as a larger sensor: there's an abundance of photons to begin with. Many smartphones today take great images in broad daylight.
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