If you like phones and particularly Android phones, the Google Pixel 6 series is very likely to be one of your most anticipated launches for 2021. I know it is for me. After LG exited the market, there is a gap in the space and while elsewhere in the world, customers have a bit more choice with phones from Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and others, in the United States, consumers are left with pretty much only two brands to battle it out: Apple and Samsung.
Other high end phones like the iPhone 12 Pro and Galaxy S21 offer a triple camera setup with a zoom lens
No telephoto lens means more than just worse zoom photos
There is another problem with the lack of a zoom lens on a high-end phone and that is the compromised quality of portrait mode photos. Portrait Mode is a blessing for pictures of people and I personally rarely take photos of people without it. Of course, your mileage may vary, but considering that Pixels have always been photo-centric devices, compromising one of the key photo features is a disappointment in my book.
Zoom lens: an essential tool for good looking photos of people
“Why is a zoom lens so important for portraits?”, you may wonder. After all, you can still use the portrait mode effect that blurs the background with the main camera. That is true, but the problem with that is that the main lens on smartphones is usually a wide one at around 24mm or 26mm. If you’ve ever played around with a professional camera, you probably know that you very rarely, if ever, would use such a focal length for portraits. It is too wide, it requires you to stand uncomfortably close to your subject and most importantly, it tends to distort the face in a very grotesque way (it makes the nose appear unnaturally large, etc). That is the reason why if you care about portrait shots of people, you would usually want a 2X zoom, or even a 3X zoom lens.
So back to our Pixel 6, we see that it skips the zoom camera and that will inevitably lead to less than ideal zoom photos and compromised portrait mode shots. Google could try and compensate for that with some sort of digital zoom enhancements, and we wouldn’t count that option out. After all, its Google that we are talking about, the company that made computational photography trendy.
