Google Pixel 5 long-term review

Google Photos

We enjoyed the changes made to Google Photos. The ability to "convert" a standard photo or selfie into a portrait one with a blurred background is not something many OEMs can currently do. "Portrait Light" is also a really cool feature that lets you breathe new life to old selfies or portraits that could use more lighting on the subject. The feature's ability to artificially adjust lighting on a face is really cool.

Photo • Now it's a portrait • Blur adjustment • Color focus • Portrait light • Vignette

Shortly after the Pixel 5 was unveiled, Google announced that the free-tier of its super popular Google Photos Backup service would begin counting against a storage quota. While many were upset, it's difficult to argue a case against keeping a high-demand service for free. Google decided it was time to start monetizing its Photos app beyond selling photo albums. The Pixel was historically known for advertising free unlimited cloud storage for camera content - but as of June this year that'll no longer be the case and you'll need to buy Google Drive storage if you want to keep backing up photos.

As an app for viewing media from various folders on-device, we don't love Google Photos, as it isn't like a traditional Gallery app. We gave Gallery Go by Google a try. It's an offline, stripped down version of Google Photos and some folks out there might like its simple interface. This app isn't very strong for editing, though. You're better off with Google Photos or switching to Snapseed for editing.

Gallery Go

Dual cameras and HDR+

The Pixel 5 uses a 12.2MP camera sensor. Google is one of the few OEMs that have not yet made the switch to using higher-resolution, quad-bayer sensors with pixel binning. In the case of the Pixel 5, it manages to keep up with these newer, larger sensors in most shooting conditions.

The Google Pixel 5 introduces an ultrawide shooter to the series. It's a 16MP sensor with 1 µm sized pixels and it sees through an f/2.2 aperture lens. This camera doesn't have any autofocus and final images are downscaled to a 12.2MP image. This helps offset the smaller pixels compared to the 1.4 µm ones from the main sensor.

In our initial review, we were quite critical of the Pixel 5's camera. We mentioned that we were growing impatient with the phone maker using the same camera sensor for several iterations of the Pixel. We also mentioned that Google should have focused on bringing some new camera tech. Those criticisms haven't changed - we still believe that Google has reached a bottleneck with respect to HDR+ processing, and perhaps new camera hardware could have potentially alleviated this.

The bottleneck is having to wait several seconds for a shot to process before you can see the result. Using this camera as a daily driver means you eventually learn that you can't take more than about seven images in rapid succession before the buffer runs out of gas and the shutter button is briefly greyed out. If you immediately went to preview the seventh image right after you smash the shutter button, you'll be waiting upwards of 7-10 seconds before it's done processing.

Taking three to five rapid, consecutive shots is not a problem. However, if you're the kind of shooter who prefers to take 25 photos of their kid running around to extract one or two usable shots, the Pixel 5 won't be able to handle this use case. The Pixel 5's slower-paced camera experience will teach you to watch and wait for the right moment instead - more like a film photographer using their shorts consciously and sparingly.

Even with the slow processing, this isn't much different than Google's previous Pixel phones and the wait is a tradeoff for the software magic that Google manages here. The Pixel camera is more for the kind of person who likes to compose shots in the viewfinder and wait for the right moment to hit the shutter.

Camera app

The simplicity of the Camera app is what makes shooting with the Pixel a joy. It doesn't distract the user with too many settings and shooting modes. Nearly every shot is captured with very well-balanced exposure, great dynamic range, and high level of details - albeit in ideal lighting conditions. The Pixel does have a tendency to over compensate in the shadows with its processing, thus resulting in unnatural-looking tones in darker areas that should really just be darker. This is why Google added the highlights and shadow sliders to adjust to your liking. While these sliders are great for photographers, most average users might not understand what it means to "lower highlights" or "raise shadows".

Camera UI: Photo • Video

There's no option to manually set the camera parameters on the Pixel camera app, but in using the Dual Exposure sliders more, we've gradually come to understand what each slider does. The "Highlights" slider adjusts the brightness of the image by the shutter speed while the "Shadows" slider raises or lowers the ISO of the sensor. Lowering the Shadows slider would result in less noise and darker shadows while lowering the Highlights slider raises the shutter speed and allows less light into the shot. Google's HDR+ would then balance exposures and clean up noise for the final shot.

Dual Exposure controls

Portrait: low shadows • regular shadows

This brings us to the Live Viewfinder of the Pixel 5. In most conditions, it is quite spot-on with the resulting image. However, it's in lower light conditions and higher contrast scenes that the Live Viewfinder feature doesn't perform as advertised. HDR+ heavily de-noises in lower light conditions (and it does so very well) but it's impossible for the viewfinder to do in real time.

Here's a screenshot of the viewfinder and the final image. There is a slightly noticeable difference between the two, and the result normally looks better once exposures and image stacking is processed. Once you get over that, it's easy to trust HDR+.

Live viewfinder

Final image

The main camera does a really good job of leveling exposures to all environments. In bright sunlit scenarios, shadows were kept in the dark - as they should be. Even when exposing something in the shadows, photos have a trace of that contrasty look that Google was once well known for.

Even though software has a heavy hand in the processing of these images, there's no excessive sharpening and noise levels are kept well under control. Details are well represented.

Daylight samples

Although there's no way to manually control it, white balance is quite accurate in nearly all situations. Google introduced AI-based white balancing with the Pixel 4 duo. It detects the kind of scene that it's looking at and contextually applies the white balance it sees appropriate. We haven't really seen any grand inconsistencies with white balance except when indoors. If all lighting sources are warm, for example, the white balance will compensate the white point and the resulting image can appear to have white (not warm) light. This can be seen in the bottle and glasses image above - which was shot under warm kitchen lights.

Colors are always pleasant and true to life. Lighting is also realistic - you can see when there are multiple lighting sources with different tones, and the resulting image will reflect it well.

Ultrawide

Ultrawide shots were consistent with the main camera in white balance, contrast, and color tones. What's not consistent, however, is dynamic range. You'll see why this is the case in lower-light shots.

In daylight shots, however, there's virtually no difference in how the photos look. Keep in mind that the ultrawide camera doesn't have any autofocus or stabilization, so you'll only notice a difference when really zooming into the individual pixels in the images.

Ultrawide shots

In anything below bright daylight, there's noticeably more noise throughout the image, but again - this is apparent only when zooming into the images.

The ultrawide camera on the Pixel 5 offers a 107-degree field of view - which isn't as wide as some of the ultrawide cameras on competitor smartphones, but it does the job and with minimal lens distortion.

"Super Zoom"

The Pixel 5 has no dedicated zoom camera, so it needs to upscale from the 12.2MP main camera. Photos at 2X are passable, maybe even 3X. Zooming in any further won't offer convincing results. The truth is that upscaling is not a true substitute for lack of a dedicated zoom camera, but the average user probably won't mind.

Super Zoom shots

The best results from using the Pixel's "Superzoom" (which doesn't really live up to the name) will only really be convincing in bright, direct daylight. We're glad to see that details don't take too much of a hit, but it does result in softer looking textures overall.

Low light

In low-light, images keep their essence and look of the real scene, but details and textures soften as a result. Final shots don't look half bad and the colors are still quite vibrant when there's some ambient lighting around.

Low-light shots

Zooming into the photo will show some traces of noise and artifacts, resulting from the software compensating for the lack of available light. Like with any camera, moving subjects or foliage are susceptible to motion blur.

Night Sight

Night Sight doesn't help much with motion blur, but it does help clean up a lot of noise and artifacts at the expense of longer capture times. Night Sight will come on automatically whenever the camera is opened in low-lit scenes which we didn't mind. There hasn't been a way to disable Night Sight from automatically kicking in, but the Camera app has been updated to let you disable this. Perhaps Google thought people generally wouldn't have even known there was a dedicated night-shooting mode.

Night Sight shots

Exposures of the scene aren't exaggerated. Highlights are lifted and colors pop while Night Sight accentuates contrasts of low-lit scenes, all while keeping noise levels low. A tripod will yield clearer shots and if you have more time, you can shoot "Astrophotography" shots.

Astrophotography

Astrophotography works best to capture starry night skies when you're far away from light pollution. If you live in a big city, you won't be able to see much of the sky, but you'll be able to get a highly detailed shot of the skyline or a nice photo of your loved ones under the moonlight. This, however, is only possible if you manage to get them to stay still for a couple of minutes.

Astrophotography shots

An Astro-photograph can take anywhere from one to four minutes to capture, and a tripod is highly recommended. The mode won't kick in unless the phone is perfectly stabilized, either leaning against something or mounted to a tripod.

Selfies and portraits

The 8MP front-facing camera is not as wide as it was in previous Pixels - which made it easier to catch group selfies. In 2021, perhaps that's not a bad thing. Anyway, the selfie camera has a fixed focus lens, but the resulting selfies have excellent dynamic range and make for flattering images in outdoor lighting.

Selfies

Indoors, selfies didn't fare as well. They still look okay, but noise is more apparent with details looking mushy. Portrait selfies look best in daylight and the bokeh is decent enough. There's always going to be some imperfection in the subject line, but that's usual for many smartphones that use this feature.

Portrait selfies

Portraits are generally better in brighter light conditions. There will still be the occasional spot that gets missed around the subject line, but the artificial blur is smooth, convincing, and pleasing to the eye.

Portrait shots