New Night Sight Mode Of Google Tested: Excellent At Taking Low-Light Photos

Even though the Pixel 3 is already a great phone, it is still somewhat incomplete. A part of that is because Google hasn’t delivered two main features of the Pixel 3 that they teased before launching them.

But, one of the missing features, Night Sight, is about to be released to Google Pixel 3, and after testing the feature for a couple of days, I strongly believe that the Google’ camera feature was worth waiting for.

Before the new feature, when capturing photos in some situations with low light, the Google Pixel often failed to match the quality of smartphones with bigger aperture lenses like the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, or beat the great Night Mode of Huawei.

But now, the Pixel 3 is finally able to compete with all of those features with Night Sight. With Google improving its computational photography skills, the latest Pixel phone now can take excellent photos in very low-light situations. And to illustrate, you can check out the photos taken by Sam from Gizmodo in the night time by cameras on some of the best smartphones.

Before moving to the photos, I just want to note that it is very easy to access Night Sight. You just need to scroll over to the More tab in the camera app and then tap the icon for Night Sight. But when it comes to taking a photo, it is not really just a click and you are done.

To be more specific, similar to the Night Mode feature of Huawei, Google’s new feature will shoot multiple photos in 3 or 4 seconds and then combine those photos together to create a final photo that looks much better than each of the previously taken photos. So if you want to have a good photo under low light, you may have to hold your smartphone very steadily.

Now moving onto the images. Starting with two photos taken by Pixel 3, one with Night Sight on and the other with the feature off. The photo without Google’s Night Sight may be a moodier final photo with its darker exposure and richer colors. But the photo with the feature on is clearly much better when it comes to sharpness and details. You can see that the text on signs is much clearer and the overall photo is also less grainy as well.

Next pair of photos were taken by the Galaxy Note 9 and Pixel 3. While the Galaxy is equipped with a f/1.5 lens and AI tuning, Pixel 3 has the computer smarts with Night Sight. Both photos, taken in a local bar, look good when zoomed out as you are still able to see things on the bar.

But when zooming the photos at 100 percent, you can even see very little details from the ability of the Pixel 3 to capture the texture on many beer taps and the wood grain on the chalkboard to the sharpness on every sticker and sight.

In the third test, the photos were taken by Pixel 3 and Mate 20 Pro of Huawei at a nighttime cityscape. And again, the photo that was taken by Pixel 3 still shows several signs of over-sharpening, the Google feature still beat Night Mode of Huawei, which up until now, was still considered as the best way to take low-light photos.

And after taking photos for the third tests, he decided to check if Night Sight can pair with Super Res Zoom feature of Google, and it seems working. But the more interesting thing is that for a camera with 3x zoom, Night Mode of the Mate 20 Pro took a blurry mess photo compared to the one taken by Pixel.

It may partly due to him having to hold both of the phones with his hands, which is pretty much very far from ideal, but both photos were taken one after another under the same circumstances and there is no clear reason why the Mate 20 Pro’s photo had so poor quality.

And in the final and possibly the hardest challenges, he took photos of a pizza lit with only a candle using the iPhone XS and Pixel 3. And anyone could easily spot the difference. The colors in the photo of the Pixel 3 are pretty brighter with better contrast as well.

And although there is still an amount of noise in the background, the rest is much clearer. If you would want to take photos in a dimly lit restaurant, the Pixel 3 with Night Sight would be a better choice to take amazing food photos.

Night Sight is really the thing that makes the photo toolkit of Pixel 3 come to be perfect. But not just Pixel 3, Pixel 1 and Pixel 3 can also get the feature in just a couple of days. For Pixel 3, owners can update its camera app today.