is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
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In case you missed it last week among other big news items, Google shipped a phone camera with a zoom feature that uses generative AI. That’s right: the Pixel 10 Pro comes with AI right inside the camera app that cleans up otherwise crappy digital zoom images all the way up to 100x. It’s a what-is-a-photo nightmare, but it’s also pretty good — at least it seems to be. But it’s hard to be completely sure what the thing you’re photographing is supposed to look like when it’s miles away. So I brought in a ringer for some side-by-side comparisons: the Nikon Coolpix P1100.
For those unfamiliar, the P1100 is a massive ultrazoom camera with an equivalent range of 24-3000mm. When you have optics like that you don’t need to do any upscaling like the Pixel 10 Pro does. The camera applies some noise reduction, sharpening, and color adjustments, sure. But it doesn’t have to completely guess at what any individual pixel should look like, because it had some information to start with.
Digital zoom, like the Pixel 10 Pro uses, is a different story. Upscaling an image 10 or 20 or 100 times without the benefit of optical magnification leaves a lot of gaps to fill in. Algorithms can make pretty good guesses, but they are just that: guesses. The Pixel 10 Pro’s Pro Res Zoom makes those guesses with the help of generative AI. And if we’re taking AI zoom photos, what better subject to start with than the moon?
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1 / 3 Taken with Pixel 10 Pro at 100x, no AI processing.
It is asking a lot of a smartphone camera to take a picture of the moon, and Google isn’t the first phone maker to bring AI to the fight. The Pro Res Zoom version certainly looks moon-like, but AI gives it a strange spongey texture that doesn’t look quite right — especially comparing it to the P1100’s version.
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