- 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)
