Google's Dual Exposure Controls and Live HDR+ features remain exclusive to Pixel 4

@madeinlisboa: Something I've gradually come to realize since my early days doing photography is that even most professional photographers aren't going around playing their camera like Mozart with a frickin' piano. I tried that and I realized that in 999 out of 1000 situations for regular people it's just not necessary.

Even a lot (not all) pros, they stick the damn thing on Shutter Priority or Aperture Priority depending on what kind of shooting they're planning on doing, pick a focus point, and go.

Maybe they dial down the exposure comp a bit, but even that's become less of a thing you have to actively manage with ISO invariance on a lot of cameras.

So yeah for most non-pros, I don't buy this ergonomics crap, sorry!

@OremLK I'm 100% with on this matter. In my case I'm not a pro anymore and it's getting harder and harder to justify more investments in photography gear, mainly because of what high end phones can deliver. I also need a good performing phone with me all the time for a plethora of reasons so, heh, you don't get more convenience than that. I also agree with your position on how cameras are actually used on the vast majority of cases. Photographers and enthusiasts tend to romanticize their relationship with a machine that, let's be honest, doesn't have many variables for us as users to manage. Even more so with all the very good automatic stuff that's been popping up in the last decades. Isn't it funny that features that were supposed to elevate a machine to a higher level of "evolution" is actually making it dispensable? Just a thought.

I also think that what can make very few photographers a little bit like Mozart is their relationship with what is around them, the people, the sky, the light, the lines and curves, the colors, not with the machine that is in their hands.

How do you port over an objectively near-perfect OLED, Soli radar sensor, neural core (where a lot of the image processing is done), a dot projector, etc? You know the neural core is required for many of the camera features, right?

The Pixel 4 is a whole lot more than it's camera software tricks. Google is the one who made it's HDR+ algorithm and Night Sight available to other phones - it's not like it got hacked.

"Google is the one who made it's HDR+ algorithm and Night Sight available to other phones - it's not like it got hacked"

That is incorrect.
Look up "BSG GCAM hack" for more details.

Actually that is pretty much correct. They didn't publish the port themselves, sure, but didn't hinder the porting in any way.

If they want, they have legal means to shut it down, but they see it more as a free advertising. For google in general, not necessarily for Pixel. Actually at a larger scale, the Pixel project itself is a sort of advertising campaign for Google.

Additionally parts of the gCam can not work in phones without special hardware components, and the gCam port is missing them, behaving effectively like a demo version of the Pixel's "full version" :)

I use an A9 to capture 1 second bursts, that's 20 frames, which I then stack, align, average etc. in post.

It's not every scene I use it and it isn't as quick and pleasant as my Pixel, but it does work, for non moving subjects only.

I agree that a very expensive pro capture device without the benefit of calls etc. should have this tech in it, but I think processing power is the limitation.

Although Sony does have stacking and averaging in-camera available for the R2 which is, sort of, affordable considering it is a beautiful FF ILMC.

"I use an A9 to capture 1 second bursts, that's 20 frames, which I then stack, align, average etc. in post."

how do u do it? in Lightroom?

Hugin/PanoTools has a tool called “align_image_stack” that can do the alignment part, and then you can use enfuse or whatever to merge them together.

There are a bunch of programs like the one above and of course Photoshop.

No, we want it straight out of jpeg from the camera not us to tweak it into beautiful picture

The upcoming Fujifilm X-Pro3 apparently has made a big move in this direction.
Read the leaked details, and you will find they are embracing computational photography into their Pro camera line.

The Sony app produces a Raw and a JPG, so you do have it avaialble sooc.

Again it's not the same thing as Google are using in the pixel however it is also significantly higher quality.

The tile based alignment Google/Apple do is indeed another major step up from just blending complete frames, and probably does require a faster burst for a worthwhile output... They end up avoiding artefacts, avoiding any kinda crop, and compensating for motion by selectively using some parts of each frame (and not others) within the tile stack for any given part of the frame...

There's no way to do that manually without a ton of work, tho I guess there's a few different apps that purport to bring the same algorithms to the desktop in post... Just stacking complete frames as people often do for astro is relatively easy by comparison. Would be interesting to see how they compare and how much of a difference a quicker burst (and/or better stabilization) make.

You should be able to buy a Pixel and use it in NZ quite easily. They come unlocked and work on every network - even if you can't buy one locally you could get one if that's the phone you wanted.

"Now if only a morning charge would last the day."

I agree it would be nice for batteries to last longer, but one have to take a moment and think actually how much battery the phones have. Without heavy usage (cpu intensive like gaming or very long screen time like watching movies for hours) most today phones have no trouble living through the day. And that with gps usage, a few email accounts constant sync, messaging apps, long phone talks, taking a few photos, etc.