Pixel 8a falls behind Pixel 8 and Galaxy S24 in PhoneArena Camera Score, but beats mid-range arch-rival

And for years, the Pixel name has also been associated with an outstanding camera. But if you follow the series, you know that the camera hardware on the Pixel 8a has not changed much and improvements are happening at a very slow pace. So is the Pixel 8a still the best camera on a $500 phone, or have other companies outcompeted it?

Main Camera

The Pixel 8a is equipped with a 64MP main shooter with f/1.9 aperture and a 26mm lens. It uses a 1/1.73″ type sensor, so quite a bit smaller compared to a typical 1/1.3″ sensor used on premium phones.

With quad pixel binning, you get a 16MP default photo, which provides a good amount of detail.

Interestingly, the OnePlus 12R has the Pixel 8a beat for main camera quality. It has fewer issues with oversharpening, which contributes to more natural looking photographs.

The Pixel 8a also lacks a hi-res mode, so despite having a 64MP sensor on board, there is no way to capture a 64MP photo, while other devices can easily capture full-resolution pictures.

Zoom Quality

Just like most phones in the $500 price segment, you do NOT get a dedicated telephoto lens on the Pixel 8a, so you need to rely on digital zoom. You have a 2X zoom preset in the camera app and the maximum zoom level is 8X.

Zoom quality is still a strong point for the Pixel compared to peers like the OnePlus 12R and Galaxy A55, which have more issues with oversharpening and capture less detail.

Portrait Mode on the Pixel 8a still lacks a proper preview of the background blur in the viewfinder and you get a 1.7X and 2X presets for portraits. The difference between these focal lengths is tiny and it makes absolutely no sense to have these preset values. Thankfully, you can zoom in up to 3X which gives you a more zoomed in portrait, but since it’s all digital zoom the quality is quite bad.

Ultra-wide Camera

The Pixel 8a comes with a 13MP ultra-wide camera with an f/2.2 aperture, and the focal length barely qualifies as ultra-wide at 20mm. This appears to be the exact same camera as on last year’s Pixel 7a, at least when it comes to hardware, and unsurprisingly the score is almost exactly the same with only slight variations in exposure and colors.

There are some issues with corner sharpness as well.

This appears to be a weak spot for the Pixel 8a, as the Galaxy A55 5G and OnePlus 12R have fewer of these issues and have support for macro shooting, which the Pixel lacks.