We have a little tree my wife and I put up every year and it’s a thing that is kinda hard to take good pictures of. There is quite a bit of dynamic range which typically means photos look overly darkened to compensate for the bright lights. 2019 has been a very good year for smartphone cameras, so I gave a few of them a shot last night to see how they’d do. Samsung Galaxy S10e Pixel 4 iPhone 11 Pro And for fun context, the 2016 iPhone SE (with the 2015 iPhone camera) Overall, I’m pretty impressed! Especially when you look at what we were using just 3-4 years ago, the differences in color ..read more

This is really basic, but gives you an idea of how these two cameras do in video ..read more

I took the iPhone 11 Pro and Pixel 4 out to a public space last night that was lit up really nicely for the holidays. This is not a complete comparison for how well each phone does, but it’s a good first test and I’ll show you the comparisons before giving you my thoughts. Point of order here, my tripod broke last night so all of these were taken handheld. Also, they were all slightly touched up in Lightroom to make the colors a little more pleasant. See this post for why I do this in my photo comparisons. On the surface, these look pretty darn similar. Especially when viewing on a phone ..read more

I read this sequence from a recent blog post on this site and had the just released Dictation for iOS and Recorder for Pixel 4 listening at the same time. Here are the exact words I read: It’s the end of the decade and I love lists, so today I’m starting a series of lists about my favorite things. Today we’re looking at my favorite albums from the past 10 years. What I learned more than anything with making this list is that 2010 and 2011 were more amazing than I gave them credit for at the time. 7 of the 10 albums below came out in those two years! Alway, I hope you like the list and check ..read more

Finding things you can test on iPhones and Android devices is kinda tricky. App launch times, while relevant to overall sense of speed, does not really test performance, and many of the apps that I could use to test an iPhone’s performance don’t run on Android. Given this, there are 6 total tests I felt I could run that were a fair comparison of speed. I broke the tests in to 3 segments: Segment 1: I ran 3 browser benchmarks back-to-back, and then immediately ran Geekbench 5’s CPU benchmark. This was in an effort to get a sustained load on the phones and see which held up bet ..read more

This is going to be a different type of review. In part because you’ve likely read and watched a bunch of reviews already which go over the spec sheets and basic functionality. Instead, I’m going to address only the parts of this phone that I find interesting and where I have not seen my opinions widely voiced out there already. It’s a wild idea, I know, but I hope you enjoy! The Pricing Conundrum The Pixel 4 starts at $799; that’s for the 64GB smaller model. However, as you have likely seen from most reviews, no one can recommend the smaller one due to its small battery, so they suggest you ..read more

I installed the pre-release version of the Google Camera app with astral photography functionality on a Pixel 3a and tried it out compared to the iPhone 11 Pro. I don’t have a Pixel 4 yet to see how it does, but I hope to get one pretty soon and will of course do a similar head-to-head when I do ..read more

The Pixel 4 has leaked all over the place, but the one that interested me the most was the new wallpaper in some of these leaks. I don’t think it’s quite my style, but if you want it on your phone have at it! Download the full resolution 5,760×12,160px version here ..read more

All of the Pixel 3 and 3a phones have a feature called Super Res Zoom. This is one of Google’s many A.I. features they brag about and I wanted to see how well it did in the real world. To test this, I took the same photo 4 times. Pixel 3a at 1x zoom Pixel 3a at 2x zoom (digital zoom) iPhone Xs 1x zoom iPhone Xs 2x zoom (optical zoom) Here are the 1x photos for the Pixel and then iPhone: The quality of these photos is basically the same, but it shows you a decent baseline and what sort of day it is (cloudy, but still pretty decent lighting). Now let’s look at a zoomed in version of this shot ..read more

The iPhone has long been a leader in smartphone photography, and last year the Pixel asserted itself in a big way, immediately becoming many people’s new favorite. While I’ve used every iPhone since the 5 and the Pixel 2 and 3, I personally prefer the iPhone for still photography in most cases. This is not the most popular opinion in some tech circles, but it is just how I feel. I made this video primarily because I took a picture that I think illustrates very clearly what I like about the iPhone’s image processing vs that of the Pixel ..read more