A new level of photographic awe, Google Pixel 8 Pro reviewed

We look at the new Google Pixel 8 Pro, see more on their website here.

Google Pixel 8 Pro reviewed

Our team were looking forward to reviewing this phone, while being curious, or even dubious about if the difference in price warranted  going the extra mile to get the pro over the regular 8. Some of the differences are software divisions rather than anything specifically different in the hardware between the two devices. This debate has continued among the team for a while.

One take on it was that, for those who are iPhone-ers (if that’s a word) then, pricewise it is less of an issue to go for the Pro over the regular. In this case the Pixel 8 Pro is a powerful tool to have in your pocket, easily as good, if not better in some ways than anything else out there on the market.

If you are in the income bracket where the pricing of the Pixel 8 Pro is not an issue, then it could be a really nice stocking filler too. The case that it came with also made the testers a little more comfortable, as it helped to negate that old issue of sleek, smooth and lethally slippy smart phones coming out of your pocket and onto hard floors at just the wrong times.

As we are talking about the extra bells and whistles that the Pro brings over the regular 8, the applied AI for photography is surely market leading at this stage. Yes it might lead you to being over reliant on the idea of ‘fix it in post production’. But this is also being promoted as a feature, and it does give you some freedom to capture faster, more darkly lit moments, as they happen, with great confidence that you will get an awesome image out of the experience.

On the journey from reviewing Pixel 3 to Pixel 8, it has been impressive to see the growth in the quality of the photography. It is beginning to be the case that you can see clear water between the level of photographs you can capture and achieve with this phone over other competitors in the market. Our testers were very reluctant to share the phone among each other, coming up with lots of reasons why they were not quite done with it yet. Overall they were all very positive about it, and all expressed the opinion that there would be no need for tears if this popped up in their Santa stockings this year, or in any month it happened to appear.

See more about the Pixel 8 Pro here

DisplayFull-screen 6.7-inch (170 mm) display 20:9 aspect ratio Super Actua display (1344 x 2992) LTPO OLED at 489 PPI Smooth Display (1–120 Hz) Corning® Gorilla® Glass Victus® 2 cover glass Always-on display with At a Glance and Now Playing Up to 1600 nits (HDR) and up to 2200 nits (peak brightness) >1,000,000:1 contrast ratio HDR support Full 24-bit depth for 16 million colours

Battery and chargingBeyond 24-hour battery life Up to 72-hour battery life with Extreme Battery Saver Minimum 4,950 mAh Typical 5,050 mAh Fast charging – up to 50% charge in about 30 minutes – using Google 30 W USB-C® Charger with USB-PD 3.0 (PPS) sold separately Qi-certified Fast wireless charging Battery Share

Memory and storage12 GB LPDDR5X RAM 128 GB/256 GB/512 GB UFS 3.1 storage

ProcessorsGoogle Tensor G3 Titan M2™ security coprocessor

SecurityVPN by Google One at no extra cost End-to-end security designed by Google Multi-layer hardware security: Tensor security core, Titan M2 security chip, and Trusty (trusted execution environment) Minimum 5 years of security updates Anti-malware and anti-phishing protection, including support for passkeys Automatic security checks and privacy controls with Security and Privacy hub Camera and mic toggles Private Compute Core Android System Intelligence Android Messages end-to-end encryption and Android backup encryption Learn more at g.co/pixel/security and g.co/pixel/certifications

Rear camera50 MP Octa PD wide camera 1.2 ?m pixel width ƒ/1.68 aperture 82° field of view 1/1.31? image sensor size 48 MP Quad PD ultrawide camera with autofocus 0.8 ?m pixel width ƒ/1.95 aperture 125.5° field of view Lens correction 48 MP Quad PD telephoto camera 0.7 m pixel width ƒ/2.8 aperture 21.8° field of view 5x optical zoom Super Res Zoom up to 30x Multi-zone LDAF (laser detect auto-focus) sensor Spectral and flicker sensor Optical + electronic image stabilisation on wide and telephoto