- So a common phrase in the video world is,
eh, we'll fix it in post.
Meaning the shot isn't quite perfect,
but we'll just fix that stuff in post-production,
kinda like this.
(drums rolling)
(magical music)
There you go.
Or how about a little bit of this too?
(drums rolling)
(magical music)
There we go, much better.
See, it's not that it's a lazy way of doing it,
but I feel like a good filmmaker
tries to get as reliably good in camera
as possible instead of relying on software.
And the we'll fix it in post version of a smartphone
is definitely the Google Pixel.
So many of the Pixel's best features
are literally fixing it in post, right?
Oh, is your face blurry in that picture you took?
Fine, Face Unblur.
Fix it in post.
Oh, what's that?
You didn't quite get that angle right on your photo?
Magic Editor.
Fix it in post.
Oh, was there a weird background audio
in that video you took?
Easy, we got Audio Eraser, fix it in post,
and many of these strategies with a little help from AI,
actually work and that's where the Pixel shines.
But there's also some things about smartphones
that you kind of just can't really fix in post.
First things first.
The design on the outside of these phones
looks, I would say, familiar.
It looks like the past few years of Pixel
which I actually really like,
but I also do think this one's a little bit better
in a few ways.
First of all, the camera circles
did the iPhone Dynamic Island thing
of combining themselves into one big circle
which I actually like with these new bigger sensors here.
And then also the Pro Pixels now have
a completely flat display,
so finally moving away from the slightly curved edges
from the past years and a satin back in every color
which does a shockingly good job at hiding fingerprints,
if your team know case like I am.
Aside from that though,
everything else is right where you'd expect it.
The one thing I wanna see if maybe they can fix now
is the dust that always accumulates
like right under and above the camera bar.
Probably the only way to get rid of that
is to sort of curve it like they did
on the Oppo Find X4 and X3,
but I don't know if they'll ever do that.
But the biggest improvement to the hardware though
is definitely upfront,
honestly to the point where I feel like these new screens
sort of tie the phone together in a way that they're up
at the level of any other flagship phone.
So the smaller Pixel 8 now has
a 6.2-inch 1080P OLED display,
slightly smaller than last year.
And that display is surrounded now
by perfectly thin even bezels all the way around,
no more tiny chin like previous years.
And it's now bumped up to 120 hertz display
that gets up to a new maximum 2,000 nits of brightness
which is incredible.
It's super bright.
They're naming it the Actua display
because they feel the need to name everything.
But I love how it's visible all the time.
Auto brightness has also been behaving this time around
which is great.
It's not LTPO though,
so you'll still probably wanna turn off
the always on display to save a bit of battery.
But then the Pixel 8 Pro has a new 6.7-inch display.
It is LTPO, it's closer to 1440P
and it maxes out at 2,400 nits max brightness.
This one is legitimately up there
with the brightest displays I've ever seen
on a smartphone in person
and I definitely did not expect that to come from a Pixel.
They're naming this the Super Actua display.
So the result is a hardware package
on the outside of the phone
that honestly feels like you can put it
right up alongside any flagships from Xiaomi,
Samsung, or anyone else, you name it.
Just from the way it's built, the way it feels,
the metal rails, the satin back,
the clickiness of the buttons, the super bright display,
the even bezels, everything about it,
it's just this is a rare W for Pixel hardware.
And then two other small things about this display, though.
One, it's still just a single front-facing camera at the top
but Google has found a way with software
to get more information out of this camera
in order to be able to use it for secure unlock
for things like banking apps and logging into things.
So basically instead of adding more hardware up front
like an infrared camera or a dot projector or radar,
if you remember that, they just fix it in post
with software magic and it's convenient.
But then number two,
the fingerprint reader has not improved.
So remember we were talking about this in the past few years
of Pixels, all the best, the highest end flagships
feels like they all have
that super fast ultrasonic fingerprint reader.
This one is still optical and still just a little bit,
just a beat slower than the high end ones.
It's not horrible, but you can tell it's not as fast
or as consistently accurate with like rain on your phone
as something like a Samsung phone.
It's also not any bigger, either.
But hey, as long as we're talking about the Pixel,
we might as well just get
right into talking about the camera
because this is where you're gonna see
the fix it in post pushed to its absolute maximum,
more than any other phone.
So the new camera sensors across the board,
they do plenty of heavy lifting, of course,
it's a big 50-megapixel primary sensor
shared across both the 8 and the 8 Pro,
F1.7 OIS and Pixel photos, they look good,
they're sharp, there's tons of dynamic range as expected.
Auto focus is really fast
and it can get a pretty shallow depth of field
with close up subjects, which is nice.
But really most of what you're looking at
when you look at a Pixel photo or video is software.
So the multiple exposures blended together
into a single HDR shot,
the strategic relighting of recognized faces.
I also, I do feel like there's
a little extra noise reduction this year.
So sometimes details get kind of watercolory
but at least there's enough resolution
that it doesn't look terrible when zoomed out.
And I've also found there is definitely a tendency
to over-HDR some images sometimes.
And when it comes to features, well, oh my god,
there are so many now.
You probably already know about Magic Eraser.
Look, oh, what's that?
You've taken a photo and someone's in the background,
you wanna get rid of 'em.
Boom, Magic Eraser, fix it in post.
Oh, what's that?
You have a photo where someone's moving a little too fast
or the hands were shaky and the face is kind of blurry.
Well, there's a feature called Face Unblur,
literally fix it in post.
And then even this new one called The Best Take,
people with kids are gonna love this one.
Basically, you know how anytime you take a group photo
where there's like five or six people in the photo,
you just blast, you just take a bunch of pictures
and inevitably, one person's face,
they're either blinking or sneezing or something.
It's never perfect.
But this feature will let you go into that group shot.
And this is for any group shot you've ever taken
in your Google Photos library, by the way,
not just a shot on the Pixel.
And it automatically recognizes the burst of photos
and lets you pick the best face from the whole burst
on each person in the photo
with surprisingly impressive accuracy.
You will genuinely never have that one person
with their eyes closed or looking the wrong way
in a group photo ever again.
I guess that makes your holiday cards that much easier.
But also even in videos, you know,
I've taken a lot of videos on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro,
there's a lot of processing happening.
I do think Pixel video is improved over last year.
It's less noisy in the shadows
and there's some nice shallow depth of field
with quick autofocus.
I shot almost the entire Corvette Z06 autofocus video
on the Pixel 8 Pro and I think it looks really good,
but also in a lot of the shots of my face,
there's this artificial brightening processing,
like you can see it in my footage before I start talking.
When it lands on my face, how it just brightens up my face
and adds this contrast and just throughout the footage,
there is a good amount of processed sharpening going on.
Also, the Audio Eraser video feature
is all right, I would say.
Again, you can only fix so much in post,
but basically they show this feature
where if you're taking videos
and there's some background noise,
you can go into the editor
and separate out like the layers of different sounds.
So there's this really cool UI
that they've built in that is super impressive.
You go into Edit Audio and Audio Eraser.
It analyzes the video and then lets you drag up or down
levels of different sounds it's identified.
So nature and voices and background sounds
and wind, you know, depends on what video you took.
It does okay with small stuff, but like, I don't know,
it's super impressive at a low level,
but then it can't really save the most disruptive wind
around our studio or the exhaust sound
of a five and a half liter naturally aspirated V8.
Like it's not magic.
About this in the main channel
in the Rimac Nevera video.
That car is electric
and basically has multiple personalities
and this one kind of does in the same way.
You've probably heard the other cliche of.
I will say shout out to the colors though.
Honestly the color in Pixel video is really good.
If you told me I could only take pictures
by taking stills from video of any smartphone,
I think I would pick the Pixel 8 Pro.
Just the footage looks so good.
Now Google, here's the thing about being so good
at software visibly is it becomes way more obvious
when you're suddenly not able to pull off a software trick
on the non-Pro phone that you are able to pull off
on the Pro phone, even though they're the same computer.
Like the good thing that you did was put the same exact chip
the Tensor G3 with the same image signal processor
and the same primary camera and the same selfie camera
in the pro and the non-Pro phones.
So this sort of artificial separation
between the Pro and the non-Pro with like software locking,
it was obvious when Apple did it
and it's even more obvious when Google does it.
So if you open up the camera
and switch over to Pro Controls,
that's only available on the Pro phone.
Now, that's funny.
Of course, you can argue the non-Pro phone
doesn't need Pro controls, but it's clearly capable of them.
Even if you bury them in settings, it's the same computer.
They also both have a 50-megapixel sensor,
but because it's locked under the Pro mode,
you can only take 50-megapixel shots on the Pro phone.
The non-Pro phone is always binning.
Theoretically that's gonna be one of the things
that you'll have to pay the 300 extra dollars
to get up to the Pro phone for,
but also someone's already ported it to the Pixel 6.
So like, come on, Google, you ain't slick.
There's even a blog post about some other features
that are coming to the Pixel.
They have this thing called Zoom Enhance.
That's basically a generative fill version of Super Res Zoom
that's coming later this year
only to Pixel 8 Pro for some reason.
And especially improved MagicERraser version
that uses Generative Fill
on the 8 Pro and only the 8 Pro.
- It's ridiculous.
It's obvious what's being done out here.
It's a nightly basis.
I hope the world can see now
what's really going on out here
'cause it's getting ridiculous.
It's really ridiculous.
- Okay, last camera thing.
Magic Editor is...
It's wild.
It's one of the wildest things they've ever made.
It is available on both phones
and it definitely goes beyond fixing it in post.
So you open up a photo, you hit Edit,
and then at the bottom left corner,
there's this wonderful colorful rainbow Magic Editor button
just tempting you to press it.
From here, the editor UI is basically saying,
all right, go ahead and select something with your hands
and then we can change it.
We can do whatever you want to it.
Select an object and you can remove it, move it around,
resize it, select a person, we can move 'em up or down
or hit the bottom middle button to switch the whole scene
to golden hour or replace the entire sky in your photo.
And then once you submit the edit
it takes a few seconds to process,
and then kind of like DALL·E,
it gives you four options of this edit
to pick whichever version is the most convincing.
They're not, you know, professional photographer level edits
meaning you can zoom in and Pixel peep
and find some edges sometimes that look weird here or there.
I also did try the exact same Generative Fill example
that they showed in their commercials
of this kid on a park bench
where it oppressively fills in the missing balloons.
When I do it, it kind of tries to do that,
but definitely doesn't do it nearly as well.
But the truth is zoomed all the way out,
these are decently convincing edits to regular people
and you can just do it with any photo in your library,
so it really just feels like without knowing
how to use Photoshop
or any of these image generation AI tools,
the Pixel Magic Editor, basically what it did
is just it lowered the barrier to entry to just lie I guess.
Now every once in a while, I did get a popup box
over my edit attempt that said it's unable to show results
because it might violate our gen AI terms.
But I was never able to find like exactly why
or any trend in this.
It seemed to come up more often
when I tried to edit a picture of a person,
but then it would totally let me just select a watermark
in a photo and effortlessly delete that,
which is probably gonna be concern for some photographers.
So yeah, I would just say that I'm probably gonna end up
making an entire separate video just about this tool
'cause it's fascinating
and what it brings into the world is wild.
But I don't know.
What is a photo?
But you know what you can't fix in post, though?
Battery life.
You can't AI your way out of a huge 2,400 nit screen
burning through battery.
You're just gonna need the hardware,
you're gonna need a big battery
you're gonna need an efficient chip for this one.
And I'm happy to report
that I have had really good battery life on the Pixels.
And this is especially on the 8 Pro.
So I've gotten six to eight hours of screen on time
regularly, standby time has been decent.
My only real question at this point is, and I only ask this
because of the history we've seen with the Pixel,
how long will the battery life be this good?
Because, you know, it could be great for a few months
and then start to fade like previous Pixels,
or maybe it'll be great for years,
the whole time you own the phone.
Only time will tell.
At the end of the day though, the Pixel is still great
at what it's always been great at, which is being smart.
Like there are so many features,
from call screening, to Google Assistant everywhere,
Google's stock apps getting so good.
And the more I use the Pixel as my daily phone,
as I have for so long,
the more I just kind of get used to this stuff
and the harder it is to live without it on another phone.
Android 14 has already breathed life
into older pixels already.
Literally my biggest primary bug
is clicking Twitter notifications, for some reason,
Just take an extra beat and a half to open.
Kind of weird.
One of the new features on this one
is when you're in any webpage in Chrome,
you can pull up Google Assistant and just ask it
for a summary of the entire webpage you're reading.
And Google Assistant with this new AI features
reads your screen and generates a summary
of three or four bullet points
that are typically pretty good.
Now I wanna try this with a few other apps,
but I basically always got an error saying
this app doesn't support summaries,
So it looks like the app developers
are gonna have to opt in to have their apps scraped
by the summaries which I kind of suspect
a lot of them are not gonna do that.
Even Google's own news app doesn't support it.
So this basically is just a Chrome thing.
And then after the summary,
it gives you a few cards to ask follow up questions
about the subject and just keep Googling more stuff.
But then just this phone
gets a lot of the little stuff right too.
Just the little things that make it feel like a flagship.
The haptics are excellent.
Like it's got some of the highest quality phone calls
I've ever heard on a phone, stuff like that.
Overall, when you put fit and finish and hardware
up alongside software experience,
and I think these new screens especially,
it feels like this is finally the generation of Pixel
that is right alongside the other flagships
of the smartphone world.
And it gets supported like a flagship too.
Seven years of software updates,
seven years of feature drop updates,
seven years of security updates,
seven years of spare parts available.
And it'll do so for the new starting price of $700.
And I think it's worth it.
I honestly, I think this is worth the new price tag.
I think everything they've done from the 120 hertz
and the brighter screen across the board,
this is a phone that I would have no problem recommending.
Now, is the 300 extra dollars for the Pro worth it?
That one's gonna be tough.
And again, it's because Google did such a good job
with feature parity, same chip, same primary camera
between these, so it's gonna come down
to the couple of small differences between them.
Do you want that telephoto camera and the bigger screen,
bigger battery, bigger phone, the temperature sensor?
I don't know.
It's harder to recommend the Pro for most people,
but the Pixel 8, this is a good phone.
So that's basically it.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys in the next one.
Peace.
(light music)