Review: Pixel 8 Pro

 Arturo and Pengtoh have long shifted over to using smartphones for their travel photography, and I've been the last holdout. What caught my eye in 2018 was when my wife produced an absolutely fantastic picture from a Pixel 3a XL:

It was perfectly exposed, and the auto-HDR worked far better than I expected. So 2 years ago we switched entirely to the Pixel 6 for smartphone use mostly because of the camera (and also the good trade-in deals we got). But my brothers bought me a Ricoh GR3 and I kept using it, repairing it twice for damage done to it. My GR3 has had about 17000 exposures behind it and now has dust spots (easily removed by Photoshop's Context Aware Fill, but that's significant work) when stopped down past about f/11.

Over the past few years, I got frustrated by the lack of a built-in zoom on the Pixel 6, but the curved screens on the Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 Pro kept me from upgrading. While I could upgrade my wife to the Pixel 7 with the outstanding Black Friday deal of 2022 ($20 + tax!), I make full use of my 256GB phones and so upgrades are neither cheap nor compelling. When I saw that the Pixel 8 series got a $100 increase in price I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to upgrade despite the now flat screen of the Pixel 8 Pro which is very tempting.

Well, two deals surfaced during the holidays that overcame my reticence. One was the 40% off retail price coupon for being a Gold status Google customer. This one was easy: switch to the 1TB tier for Google one and wait 3 days. I had plenty of Google Rewards credits and no better way to use it, so I did that. The other was the Youtube $125 coupon which stacked with the holiday $200 off promo. So we ended up with 2 Pixel 8 Pros, and the price was very good after the trade-ins for our various existing Pixels. (Google was offering the same price for the phones as they were going on Swappa, which meant that it was better to trade in the phones than to try to sell them on Craigslist!)

Google has actually improved the onboarding experience of new Android phones. Now the transfer from your old phone is wireless. The restoring of apps is dumb though ---> every app you ever installed not gets installed on your new phone, so I went through and deleted all of them. All the authenticator apps now also back up to the cloud, so you no longer have to go through and re-register every account you ever had on your 2FA app.

The first thing I notice were the quality of life issues: the fingerprint reader now worked consistently, and the face unlocked was so fast the first time my wife's phone unlocked with face recognition she thought that the security system was broken! The phone charged faster and used less power. For instance, on a 2 hour drive in the past my Pixel 6 could never charge from 20% to 80%, but now the Pixel 8 Pro will easily go to over 90% for a drive that long! Overnight when not plugged into a charger the Pixel 8 Pro no longer loses more than 5% of its battery at most, and this is with both work and personal accounts sync'd to the phone, as well as the kids' accounts. The phone is fast and smooth, and I no longer felt the need to turn off the high resolution display. I took Boen on a backcountry camping trip in Point Reyes with the phone in airplane mode. At the parking lot, the phone was at 65%. After about 24 hours of biking, hiking, and camping using the phone for photos and running the National Park Service App for maps, I returned to the parking lot with 35% of battery. That's outstanding compared with the Pixel 6 --- I did not have battery saver on, and would occasionally get out of airplane mode to see if I had reception. With the phone at 100% I'd expect to survive a 3 day backpacking trip on airplane mode and being liberal about shooting photos and videos. The bigger battery and lower power draw on the chip obviously made a big difference.

The photos, are of course, the meat and potatoes of the phone. I shot a few photos side by side with the main camera on the phone and the Ricoh GR3:

Ricoh GR3

Pixel 8 Pro

You can see that the GR3 with its stopped down aperture can produce sun stars, while the Pixel 8 Pro suffers from flare. But the exposure and color balance on the Pixel 8 Pro out of the box is just so much better! Here are two more shots, one from the Ricoh GR3 and one from the Pixel 8 Pro's 5x lens.

Ricoh GR3, 28mm uncropped

Pixel 8 Pro 5x telephoto lens

Here, the Pixel 8 Pro clearly has artifacts and an artificialness not present in the GR3 shot. But it's still competitive and the 5x lens grants a better composition. Next, let's compare a cropped GR3 shot to the uncropped 5x Pixel 8 Pro lens.

Ricoh GR3 Cropped

Pixel 8 Pro 5x Telephoto

No question, the GR3 is no longer competitive, no matter what I did in lightroom. The automatic macro mode is also impressive:

The long exposure mode on the camera also lets you get nice waterfall shots

Long Exposure

Original

It's quite clear that computation photography has allowed phone cameras to keep up with dedicated cameras, even ones with APS-C sized sensors like the Ricoh GR3. But that's not all. The dedicated camera makes have made things worse by taking away features that used to be in cameras! For instance, nearly all cameras in the 2000s had GPS chips and stored location data in EXIF, which is absolutely useful for travel photography. No there aren't any high quality cameras that can do that without a badly written app that's going to run on your smartphone instead. (Note that my Nikon W300 does do this, and it's a very nice waterproof camera that I still use!) The lack of weatherproofing also precludes you taking a camera out in the rain.

At this point, I'm willing to stop considering a smartphone to be something for making phone calls, but instead as a waterproof, dustproof camera. In that sense the Pixel 8 Pro has come to displace my dedicated cameras and I will now seriously consider selling my dedicated cameras off.

You cannot beat that as an endorsement. The Pixel 8 Pro is that good.