Pixel 4a with the average flagship smartphone costing
between one to two thousand dollars can a device that costs a fraction of the price hold its own
so today we're talking about this little guy the pixel 4a now if you're familiar with this
channel or you just clearly read the title you can tell that we're mostly going to be
focusing on the camera and video features of this phone but we're going to take the next one to two
minutes just talking about the overall experience of this awesome budget phone first up let's talk
about the design now this is a pretty small phone now here we have a 5.8 inch oled display
with corning gorilla glass 3 and a polycarbonate unibody throughout this whole video you can't
forget that this entire phone is 350 bucks so it's definitely in the budget category although it
feels very small compared to other phones it feels very solid and something that other phones usually
tend to kind of skimp out on is the buttons these might be the most tactile buttons i've
ever seen on any phone like they almost almost feel too like clicky
crazy now of course depending on when you buy it it's probably going to come with android 10
out of the box but a simple update is going to bring you up to the latest android 11 since of
course it's a google pixel phone so you're gonna get updates as fast as they release them that
also means the software experience is literally stock android so there's no extra bloatware so
even though this doesn't have the highest end specs and only six gigs of ram but i think most
people would be plenty fine with the speed that you get you know jumping around and using your
daily apps now although you don't get wireless charging it does have fast charging and with
a just over 3100 milliamp battery it's going to give you pretty good battery life overall now the
rear camera boasts a 12.2 megapixel sensor and it does have autofocus with dual pixel face detection
optical and electronic image stabilization pixels have always had pretty good image
stabilization so the combination of both optical and digital is pretty cool and it's pretty decent
in low light with a f 1.7 aperture so honestly not too shabby for again a budget phone now as
i've proven in every video so far there's a huge difference between the software and the apps that
you use that utilize the hardware of the camera so first we're going to talk about this stock
just google camera app that comes on the phone and then a couple third-party options that can
enhance the experience in some ways and we'll kind of compare and contrast the pros and cons to each
now stock camera app everyone knows how to use these types of app they're pretty much all laid
out the same you do get a handful of i'd say kind of a little bit more unique but becoming everyday
options that you have this can shoot between raw raw plus jpeg for stills you can change the codec
to the hevc so i definitely recommend changing it if you want a little bit higher quality images
pulled out of it while also maintaining better compression and smaller file sizes now on the
4a you do get a bunch of handy little camera modes that you can shoot in such as night sight which of
course is google's uh way to take a long exposure at night to be honest these weren't anything too
crazy to me after using the galaxy s20 ultra a handful of weeks ago uh this one is kind of just
meh and one standout feature that i don't see a lot of people talking about is actually the dual
exposure controls and when i first saw this i kind of thought that it was just going to do its own
like hdr image because it does have live hdr but no this is where you tap on the screen and you can
actually control your shadows and your highlights independently and i'm a huge fan of this because a
lot of times especially if a subject is outside maybe they're backlit the sun is behind them
you can bring down the highlights and bring up the shadows and hopefully give you a better
hdr kind of look help you out with dynamic range now in terms of video again going back
to the whole budget thing uh there's not too many standout features you basically have 4k at 30 you
can go 1080 to 120 and 720p you can get up to 240 frames but of course the compression on the slo-mo
you know besides just the novelty effect of having slow motion like many phones um they're not going
to be something that you're going to want to use if you're trying to use this phone for actual um
any sort of real projects in my opinion but yeah overall the look that you're going to get from the
stock camera app is pretty on par with what you would expect now google has nice colors nothing is
crazy over saturated there is some pretty heavy uh moire going on but that's basically you can see it
and anything that has very close kind of gridded lines to it where you can see it a little bit in
these clips in the fencing or the wood grains of the side of the building that kind of really
easily give it away as a really kind of ultra lower budget digital camera look overall it's
okay but i think this can do a little bit better and that's where we're going to jump into mc
pro 24 fps it's a mouthful of a name but it's an awesome third-party app that you can download of
course the link will be in the description below if you want to check it out there was only about
500 comments on the previous phone videos asking that i talked about this app so i reached out to
the developer and they were nice enough to lend me a redemption code so i was able to download it and
play with it and show you guys what it's all about well say it's simply enough up front this app
is awesome and truly pretty much worth every penny that it costs on the main screen you have a ton of
data that you can choose to turn on and off i've left the interface pretty much stock what it comes
in out of the box but you can actually turn off uh certain pieces of information you don't care
to see or turn on ones that aren't there from the beginning so for example something i turned
on is to be able to see all of the information um all my shooting modes so i can see that most
of the clips that you're about to see were shot at 3840x2160 gpu turned on 24 fps in hevc codec
this is 8-bit i know a lot of you were saying 10-bit on the sony xperia they do have 10-bit
in this app for about five different phones you can check it out in the description of the app if
you want to now i am shooting at the highest bit rate because bitrate is way more important than
resolution and so this caps out at 500 megabits per second and i will say that there were times
where i don't know if the phone was doing things in the background but i was dropping frames like
crazy after a couple seconds of filming however the past couple days that i've been using the app
it's been recording just fine so your results may vary as you go into the higher bit rates and you
can see the options actually start to turn red so if you are going to use this on your daily driver
phone and you want to keep your phone for many years you may want to be wary of going to some
of the options in red but for a handful of shots that i've had i haven't experienced any issues now
like a bunch of third-party apps you can go in here you can control the iso the shutter speed
the white balance all that stuff you get a really nice histogram which of course i always love and
talk about but honestly one of the standout features besides the 10-bit on the handful
of phones as i've mentioned before is the ability to turn off basically all of the post-processing
now out of the camera the footage looks way worse you can see the shot of my studio here
now as you can see it is way more noisy shaky the colors are bad but that's basically the experience
you get when shooting on a cinema camera and so yes the sensor in here is ultra ultra
small so it's going to be way more noisy the reason you want to turn off things like noise
reduction image stabilization and pretty much create everything to be neutral colors
as this has a bunch of different log modes to it you do all this so that you have the control
in your post production software to add as much or as little as you want so i'll take this really
bad looking raw image here and i'll clean it up so in this studio shot again it has really bad
chroma noise but really bad chroma noise is a dead giveaway for crappy digital phone or just
any camera footage but in davinci resolve you can actually control them independently so i can go in
and just turn up some chroma noise reduction and it definitely looks better now if i start
to apply luma that's where things kind of get pretty muddy but again i'm in full control here
if we just go back and look at the stock camera app it's going to apply as much noise reduction
as it thinks now in some cases that may turn out better and so for low light stuff or situations
like this honestly i may just keep the stock camera app but here in this next clip when we
go outside to the dog park here it's bright and it's sunny and so i don't have any issues with
low light again i turn off all this stuff and now i have way more control and personally i think
you can push the image way farther and it looks way better and a lot of that has to do with the
higher bit rates now going back to stabilization again i mostly turned off because again i like to
add it back in say in davinci or whatever editing program of choice but i also like to throw this on
a little gimbal and that's gonna eliminate a lot of the shake as well now again this camera has
optical image stabilization as well as digital and so it's not that bad but if you're using a phone
that only has digital stabilization it's actually going to crop your image significantly here
so if you simply just turn off image stabilization in the device itself you get more
um composition room essentially and then if you need to stabilize it in post again
you are in control of how much you can crop in now people want me to talk a little bit more about the
still images that you can get out of these phones too and here again one more time i'm gonna have to
go back to a 350 dollar budget phone the photos you get out of this are pretty good but uh i
definitely recommend using some sort of raw image capture to make them not again have that kind of
ugly post-processing that just looks like blah shooting in raw is going to give you the control
to add whatever style you want to your images and definitely take the extra couple minutes
if you are taking a bunch of pictures of your kids your dogs your house whatever
the subject is adobe lightroom is definitely one of the top choices out there so spend a
couple minutes in there and you're going to see a world of difference once you start practicing
and really kind of starting to enhance your photos as well as your videos bring them into either on
the device into some sort of video editor transfer to a computer and use final cut premiere resolve
whatever editing software of choice you want and really spend some time cutting the clips together
color correcting if you're using some sort of like the mc pro 24 fps app if you are using the
stock video app you're not really going to be able to color too much as soon as you start to
adjust the exposure or colors it's really going to start to break pretty quickly so
if you want to experience color correction color grading and changing the style and look
definitely use one of those kind of log profiles in one of those third-party apps that allow you
to get those advanced features so overall would i recommend the pixel 4a to someone who wants to use
a phone as their kind of full-time video or photo camera where this sits is someone who wants the
best phone for the best price utilizing some of those third-party apps practice and some editing
skills you can really push this camera and this device to compete with a lot of flagship phones
so if you're asking the question can the pixel 4a produce a high quality image for video and photos
the answer is yes because at the end of the day i know the answer is annoying but it's mostly about
the shooter and not the camera it really has a lot to offer and 350 phones have come a long way
let me know what you guys think down in the comments below do you like the pixel 4a
would you recommend it if you like the style and format of this video hit the thumbs up helps me
know that you guys want more of these videos and i'll keep tracking down different phones
to see if they truly can compete with cinema cameras or at least give you a cinematic style
image hope you guys liked the video thanks so much for watching see in the next one