Jeremy Burge did some side-by-side low light shots, showing the iPhone camera vs Android’s Night Sight. Scroll through the tweets below:
https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1083676824343887879
To me, this is my iPhone camera’s biggest weakness, the one feature that tempts me to carry a Pixel 3, just for the ability to capture better low light images.
Google has a fantastic writeup on Night Sight in this blog post. Jump to the section titled “Capturing the Data” for the details.
As you make your way through the Twitter thread, don’t miss the interaction between Jeremy and Rene Ritchie. It’s not clear that my iPhone is not capable of producing similar, or even superior low light images. It may be simply that Apple chose not to ship a low-light mode that did not deliver pictures that met their standards. But as is, I’d rather have the oversaturated Night Sight images than ones that were simply dark.
There are many things I do love about the iPhone and iOS, but it’s the hope for a model/iOS update with a competitive camera that keeps me limping along with my battered 6.
What a Pixel — any Pixel, including the original 2016 model — puts out tends to shame even the latest X-series iPhones. Given all the brilliant imaging minds and great silicon behind iPhone, that’s shocking.
If you want to carry a second smartphone just to take NightSight photos, then, uh, that’s an interesting perspective you have. No way would I trade all of the things iOS does better than Android just for that feature tho.
The XS camera is amazing and every bit the equal of the Pxel 3 cam… except in low light. So don’t buy into the “Pixel 3 >>> XS” BS. UNLESS you shoot at night etc. Then, yeah, the Pixel is amazing and Night Sight makes me jealous. I’m hoping this is a software updatable feature but I think it might be something that needs to be in silicon.
“… I’d rather have the oversaturated Night Sight images than ones that were simply dark.”
Especially since, if I care about that, I can use an image editor to correct the saturation. The same isn’t true of dark pics.
To me it looks like all Google is doing is brightening the shadows and making colors more vibrant. So they’ve taken a couple of editing steps and turned it into a “night mode”. Not too special to me. They also look highly edited and not like the real world scene does.
I agree about low light. Also long exposure and better focusing on videos with motion. All need improvements and all should be native to the camera app.